Steve Bush August 19, 2020
A flow battery is an energy storage structure that stores chemical energy as a liquid electrolyte in a tank and pumps the liquid to the reaction site-the membrane electrode assembly (MEA)-when electricity must be generated or charging is required.
This separates the number of watts that a flow battery can produce from the number of joules it can store-a larger tank provides more joules, or a larger MEA provides more watts. Therefore, flow batteries are a possible technology for grid-scale energy storage in the future-as the proportion of solar and wind energy increases, the demand for energy storage from the grid is increasing.
Vanadium redox flow batteries are particularly attractive for grid storage because the electrolyte will not degrade even after tens of thousands of operating cycles.
Now, scientists at the Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology in Russia are proposing a new MEA design for vanadium redox flow battery, using a flow plate made of laser-cut graphite foil.
"We have proposed a new MEA design, which will facilitate the research process and greatly reduce the barriers for new research groups to enter the field," said Dmitry Konev, a scientist at the research institute'IPCP RAS' in collaboration with the university. this project. "This will help make significant progress and elevate distributed energy from a niche positioning to a very high level of commercialization."
MEA is a sandwich structure. When one of the electrolytes is oxidized and the other is reduced, electrons are generated or consumed-hence "redox".
The way these electrolytes flow through the sand is controlled by a flow plate (see picture).
"The performance of the battery depends to a large extent on the organization of the flow field," the university said. "Therefore, researchers often choose different types of fields to optimize battery performance, but this is a labor-intensive task"-because the flow field is ground into graphite plates.
Instead, Russian researchers have proposed a different approach.
Mendeleev University researcher Roman Pichugov said: "We use several thin layers of flexible graphite material to form the flow field-where the necessary patterns are cut by a laser, and then these layers are superimposed on each other to obtain the desired field. "The process of creating the flow field only takes a few minutes, which is much less than traditional graphite milling. In addition, cheaper materials are used, so the flow field has a wider range of changes and choices."
Using laser cutting flow plates, the Russian team tested various vanadium salt solution flow fields. "The results obtained are consistent with the best studies in the world at the qualitative level, and even slightly higher than them at the quantitative level: the capabilities of the tested MEA Slightly more than the power of similar batteries on graphite," the university said. "Therefore, MEA's new design greatly simplifies laboratory testing and can be used in the real energy storage system of distributed grids in the future."
Using vanadium-sulfuric acid electrolyte, the graphite sheet MEA battery exhibits a peak power density of 734mW/cm2 and an energy efficiency of 84.3% at SOC 50. It is charged at a constant current of 75mA/cm2 at an electrolyte utilization rate of 84.5%. Under the discharge cycle, according to the field change of the "electrolyte flow": the battery used to test and optimize the membrane electrode assembly of the vanadium redox flow battery, which describes the work in ChemPlusChem.
Tag: flow battery laser
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