Tag Archives: flow battery

Researchers at the Chinese Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics have produced stable organic redox compounds for use in aqueous flow batteries. “Organic redox-active molecules [ORAMs] are abundant and diverse, offering significant potential for energy storage, particularly in aqueous organic flow batteries,” according to the Institute. “However, ensuring the stability of the ORAMs during the charge and discharge process is critical, ...

Sub-millimeter microtubular (hollow fibre) bundled membranes could shrink the size of flow battery reactors, according to the Georgia Institute of Technology. In a proof-of-concept zinc-iodide battery, the reactor part achieved 306.1W/litre discharge and charging at 1,322W/litre. Key to the concept is using tubes-within-tubes to make the reaction vessel into a self-supporting structure – doing away with the volume-consuming support hardware ...

Flow batteries show promise for grid-scale storage as, like fuel cells, they decouple power output and energy storage when building a battery: the reactor is sized for power output and the surrounding tanks are sized for energy capacity. Given a low-cost working fluid and big tanks, they could store enormous amounts of energy. Seeking that low-cost fluid, MIT is proposing to ...

Flow batteries are energy storing structures that store chemical energy as liquid electrolytes in tanks, and pump those liquids to a reaction site – a membrane-electrode assembly (MEA) – when electricity must be produced or re-charge is needed. This separates the number of watts a flow battery can produce from the number of joules it can store – bigger tanks give ...

Researchers at Fraunhofer Umsicht (Fraunhofer institute for environmental, safety and energy technology) have developed a ‘bipolar plate’ (explained below) for bipolar construction batteries (ditto) that is flexible and can be made on a roll-to-roll process. “We manufacture bipolar plates from polymers that have been made electrically conductive,” said Fraunhofer researcher Dr Anna Grevé. “In this way, we can produce very thin plates ...

Researchers at Stanford University have proposed liquid sodium-potassium alloy as an electron donor in a flow battery. Instead of storing electrons within the structure of a battery, a flow battery stores electrons in the form of chemicals in tanks, which are pumped into an electrolytic cell when charge or discharge is required. The action decouples power and energy storage, which ...