redox flow battery

Australian miner IGO is building upon its renewable energy options at its Nova nickel operation after signing an agreement with Perth-based energy storage company VSUN Energy to test a hybrid standalone power system backed by a vanadium redox flow battery.

US scientists claim to have created a crossover-free, high-voltage, non-aqueous hybrid flow battery with a novel chemistry for the solid sodium anode. The device has shown a high working voltage of around 2.6 V and a coulombic efficiency of 95.0%.

Researchers from Hong Kong have applied a novel charge-reinforced, ion-selective (CRIS) membrane to a polysulfide-iodide redox flow battery they had built in 2016. The redox flow battery showed a capacity decay rate of just 0.005% per day for 1,200 cycles, and a lifetime with over 2,000 hours’ cycling, which the academics said corresponds to approximately three months.

The storage system is based on fluorenone derivative anolytes. Despite its small dimensions, the device is claimed to have an energy density that is more than twice that of the vanadium batteries in use today.

German scientists have proposed a new design for stacks used in redox flow batteries. Through a powder-to-roll process, a device that weighs 80% less than a conventional stack was fabricated.

Scientists in Russia have designed a whole series of new compounds that could serve as catholytes and anolytes in organic redox flow batteries. The materials promise to open up new pathways for further research, and overcome some of the challenges for organic redox flow batteries in commercial, large-scale energy storage projects.

The Landshut University of Applied Sciences and German start-up Voltstorage will initially develop a residential battery with a capacity of 8 kWh. At a later stage, they want to fabricate a 50 kWh device for applications in the commercial segment.

European scientists are designing a new type of redox flow storage system aimed at flexibly balancing power grids in the event of critical conditions. Funded by the EU, the research project is being coordinated by the Landshut University of Applied Sciences and runs until 2023.

Batteries based on vanadium or zinc bromide represent the cutting edge of redox flow storage tech, an international research team has claimed. They have identified challenges and opportunities for about a dozen redox flow storage technologies, while providing estimates of their current and projected levelized costs of storage.

Redflow CEO, Tim Harris, is confident the company’s Gen3 flow battery will go into production in the first half of this year, once the results from its customer trial are evaluated.