Imagine the elegant simplicity of a flow battery for your home solar, or energy storage. Being water-based, should mean no worries over your home burning down from a lithium-ion battery fire. Manufacturers’ Monthly confirms how engineers at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia developed a solution that may be well-worth considering in future.
Why You May Need a Flow Battery For Your Home
The Monash Engineers have been working on a flow battery that might enable you to store your rooftop energy more cost-effectively. Their report in Wiley Online Library, describes how they evolved an ‘ultra ion-selective membrane with very low cycle-capacity decay’.
Lithium-ion batteries have tended to dominate household energy storage, on account of their capacity, and fast charging speeds. This has shifted interest in redox flow batteries to the bulk storage sector slow lane. Battery recharging depends on the ion shuttling rate between electrodes.
The research report that we link to below, explains how recharging flow batteries depends on ‘exquisite transport control of species across the cell’. In this regard, positive cations are the key to high current density, while negative anions influence the degree of cycling stability.
A New Membrane Helps Organic Flow Batteries Compete
If you are considering a flow battery for your home energy storage system, then you may be interested in how the research panned out. The Monash engineers accelerated their charging rate, with a novel ‘ultra-ion-selective speek-sx membrane’.
This was a membrane that allowed the ‘good’ ions to flow through quickly, while deterring the ‘bad’ ones. This opened the door to ‘fast, stable operation’, even at high current densities. There was almost no ion / capacity loss after 600 discharging recharging cycles.
Are you are searching for a flow battery for your home or garage that is non-toxic, non-flammable, and made from abundant materials? If so, then the Monash redox flow battery might suit you in principle. However, you will have to wait for several years more, before this one becomes commercially available.
More Information
Redox Flow Batteries Could Come of Age
The Inner Secrets of Flow Batteries
Preview Image (Monash Organic Redox Flow Battery)
