Typically if you want to DIY something you first start with the smallest prototype possible and work your way up from there.
This demo cell isn't super interesting on its own but to validate the chemistry it's super helpful. Once you got that done you'd then work on a stack of cells, say 10 or 20 or 40 to get up to normal system voltages.
Once you have that working it's just a matter of making the tank as big as you want for your storage. Provided the initial chemistry is reasonable you could probably use a pair of IBC totes and really go somewhere.
Yeah! The thing about flow batteries is that if we manage to find good chemistries, they have the potential to be very cheap energy storage compared to ordinary batteries. High energy, low power, low cost.
Ie the small electrodes cost something but the big bag of fluid might be cheap.
Say, vitamin- like substances consisting of extremely common elements like hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon etc could be used to store energy in a flow battery. Even with quite low performance, they could be very cheap compared to things like cobalt, nickel, manganese or lithium.
Or what about quinones? And sodium, sulphur, sodium are cheap too. There are a lot of very cheap chemistries that could be explored!
Comments
Typically if you want to DIY something you first start with the smallest prototype possible and work your way up from there.
This demo cell isn't super interesting on its own but to validate the chemistry it's super helpful. Once you got that done you'd then work on a stack of cells, say 10 or 20 or 40 to get up to normal system voltages.
Once you have that working it's just a matter of making the tank as big as you want for your storage. Provided the initial chemistry is reasonable you could probably use a pair of IBC totes and really go somewhere.
Yeah! The thing about flow batteries is that if we manage to find good chemistries, they have the potential to be very cheap energy storage compared to ordinary batteries. High energy, low power, low cost.
Ie the small electrodes cost something but the big bag of fluid might be cheap.
Say, vitamin- like substances consisting of extremely common elements like hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon etc could be used to store energy in a flow battery. Even with quite low performance, they could be very cheap compared to things like cobalt, nickel, manganese or lithium.
Or what about quinones? And sodium, sulphur, sodium are cheap too. There are a lot of very cheap chemistries that could be explored!
Bingo, this is exactly the plan. Of course there are non-trivial engineering challenges when scaling up, but that's the rough idea.