I’ve been sending these guys $10 a month for a while now. Thir test cell is chemistry agnostic, and I think they have tried several ferrous solutions. The membrane issue is not that big of a deal it seems if you aren’t trying to miniaturize the device- separator material used in car batteries can be used to good effect and it’s easy to replace if needed.
I love this kind of work. They had an ambitious timeline and the last entry was at the beginning of this year -- do you have a sense if they are still going strong?
I’m really not sure. Things like this often run out of steam, get picked up later, etc as the interest and the lives of the people change, new people come, old ones move on. We will see.
Comments
The idea has been kicking around for a while because it's superficially appealing.
Benefits:
- you can store huge amounts of energy in relatively cheap tanks
- because the + and - storage are physically separate, self discharge can be very low
- those two make it appealing for long term storage
Downsides:
- reagents end up being some combination of expensive (vanadium), poisonous, corrosive, etc. resulting in safety overhead
- requires specialized plumbing. This is very expensive. Ultimately this is the issue with nuclear as well, every joint requires careful inspection
- does not scale down nicely to house sizes
- ultimately likely to get economically lapped by incremental improvements to lithium or sodium battery chemistry
- the charge/discharge cell requires a liquid/liquid membrane separator which can exchange charge; these tend to have lifetime issues.
I’ve been sending these guys $10 a month for a while now. Thir test cell is chemistry agnostic, and I think they have tried several ferrous solutions. The membrane issue is not that big of a deal it seems if you aren’t trying to miniaturize the device- separator material used in car batteries can be used to good effect and it’s easy to replace if needed.
https://fbrc.dev/
I love this kind of work. They had an ambitious timeline and the last entry was at the beginning of this year -- do you have a sense if they are still going strong?
I’m really not sure. Things like this often run out of steam, get picked up later, etc as the interest and the lives of the people change, new people come, old ones move on. We will see.