Tag Archives: flow battery

Working on a large scale open source flow battery design and kit

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During the past couple of years we have been working on the design of a small flow battery kit for the study of flow batteries (you can read a previous post about it here). With the help of an NLNet grant, we have fully developed the first two versions of our small scale kit – with the second one achieving even longer scale tests – and are now working on the development of a larger surface area kit that can be used to study flow batteries or build flow battery applications at a relevant scale for practical power storage.

A flowframe being printed on our Prusa Core One on Polypropylene. Such a large flat area piece is very hard to print without warping in non-heated chambers.

This new large area setup – which we have discussed in our forum – is now moving out of the design stage thanks to the acquisition of new systems for both 3D printing (Prusa Core One) and vinyl cutting (Cricut Maker4) that are allowing us to move to their in-house fabrication and testing. The new cell is designed to be compatible with the area of 3D printing beds and features an active area of 13.5×13.5cm, which is 182.5cm2. In practice this means a single cell will be able to handle a capacity of nearly 22Wh when using the Zn-I chemistry used in our small scale design.

We borrow some of the features that worked great for our small scale kit – like using a polypropylene enclosed flow frame – and add features that are needed for a scalable design (like all entry/exit points on the same side, stacking compatible design, etc).

Finished flow frame held against light so that you can see the flow field design. This design is not final and will change as we do fluid testing.

The fabrication of these pieces is especially challenging due to their size and the complexity of the flow fields in them. The flow fields have to follow complex paths to prevent the creation of large shunt currents within the device. A really good 3D printer with a heated enclosure is required to be able to print this in polypropylene with no warping and good enough resolution. Even with such a printer, a lot of fine tuning is still required to achieve the low level of surface roughness and high level of water tightness that is needed for this particular application.

While we are thinking about the potential of using heat welding or even adhesives to be able to put the cell together, the easiest first approach will be to use the same silicon gaskets as we used for the fabrication of our initial cells. To cut our gaskets in house we are using a Cricut Maker4 vynil cutter, which is able to make this high precision cuts without any problems.

One of our 3D printed polypropylene flow frames next to a silicone gasket

With these materials now fabricated, we are now close to putting together our first tests of a larger scale flow battery cell. The idea of these initial tests will be to test the cell for leaks and make sure we can circulate water without problems before we try to run any active materials. We will be using thick wood as endplates for this initial test, as this is the easiest to source, hard material, that can be used. Thanks to our use of fully enclosed gaskets, the end plates will also have zero contact with any water or active materials.

This flow battery kit work is being funded by the Financed by Nlnet’s NGI0 Entrust Fund. We are also collaborating with the FAIR Battery project.

Long term cycling of our Flow Battery kit using a Zn-I chemistry

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Our goal at the Flow Battery Research Collective (FBRC) during the past year has been to develop and manufacture a flow battery kit that can be used to study flow batteries at a small scale in a low cost yet reproducible manner. Today I want to discuss all the problems we have found when attempting long term cycling in both versions of our kit and how we have addressed them so far.

Long term cycling results with the first version of our kit. Around 5 days of cycling.

Our first kit design – which you can see above – was able to do long term cycling of an electrolyte composed of Zinc Chloride (1m) and Potassium Iodide (2m) in a potassium acetate/acetic acid buffer (pH=5.2). We were able to obtain capacities higher than 10Ah/L (on total volume of electrolyte — note previous values on this blog were based on catholyte only) without much capacity fade at the 25 cycle range. I didn’t try longer term cycling because of issues with pumps getting damaged by the tubing I was using leaking iodide (see how orange the right pump above looks, that’s not supposed to happen). At this point we were also testing several types of tubing, reason why you can see different colors of tubing in the setup.

However, this design had two big issues. The first is that the polypropylene bodies were getting over compressed at the top and under compressed at the center, so after a single long term cycling event (cell cycling for 5 days), the cell would never seal well again after being opened due to warping of the body. This made this design completely unfeasible and forced us to accelerate the development of v2.

Long term cycling results of second version of our kit. Cycling was also around 5 days.

The second cell design – showed in the second image above – has a square design with even compression and complete isolation of the cell body from the electrolyte by using a sealed polypropylene flow frame (you can read more about it in the FBRC website). However, despite using the exact same electrolyte and membrane, this design has been showing some increasing decay of the electrolyte as a function of time. The cycled capacity is a bit lower and after 28 cycles the testing had to be stopped due to obvious deterioration of the charging potential.

Flow batteries using microporous membranes can suffer from significant issues related to hydraulic pressure differences between anolyte and catholyte. As the battery is cycled, there is net water transfer between both sides and this can lead to the accumulation of polyiodide species in a Zn-I flow battery. This deteriorates the charging potential and reduces the SOC of the battery. You can ready more about this decay mechanism in this paper. When my testing was done, there was indeed an almost 50% less fluid in the anolyte vs the catholyte side, interestingly the completely opposite effect when compared to the paper. Changing the supporting electrolyte concentration or Zn salt used – to make the water changes less extreme – or adjusting electrolyte flow rates, can help eliminate these volume balance issues.

New flow frame design for the second version of our kit. You can see the flow channel has been colored red by the catholyte. The flow frame was 3d printed. Since 3d printing leaves some porosity (even at 100% infill) you can see some coloring even away from the flow channel.

There are however other problems with the current tests. The first is that the chemistry is not stable to oxygen – both due to iodide and zinc reactivity – so working under atmospheric conditions without any inert gas purging of the electrolyte has likely made my tests more unstable, due to Zinc passivation and pH instabilities caused by the reactions of iodide with oxygen. Since the new flow frames are 3d printed – therefore not 100% free of pores – they might be letting more oxygen in, which might also be why the system is more unstable than v1 in this regard. Getting flow frames manufactured through polypropylene sintering or injection molding could get rid of this issue.

Another issue – shown below – is the use of graphite foil (grafoil) as our electrode material. Although grafoil does the job fine, it does seem to be porous to iodine, which crosses it and reacts with the underlying copper, increasing series resistance and creating a protuberance on the copper plate (which is readily visible in the image after long term cycling). I scratched the grafoil to then reveal a white powder, which is copper iodide, leading to a further loss of capacity. This problem could be solved by using a proper bipolar plate material or by sealing the grafoil in some manner. Thicker grafoil could also be enough to ameliorate the problem.

Catholyte side graphite foil, 0.5mm, after 5 days of cycling. You can see a bump in the foil caused by buildup of copper iodide material below the electrode.
A high capacity short cycle result using a Zn-I electrolyte. This is using total volume of electrolyte, so a capacity that would be in line with current Vanadium batteries.

I also want to note that we have achieved much higher capacities – see above – although not in long term cycling, as these higher capacities generate much more concentrated electrolytes that have significant problems (such as the precipitation of insoluble solid elemental iodine and the corrosion of the pumps and copper current collectors).

As you can see, getting long term cycling results is not easy. There are many hurdles to overcome to be able to provide a kit that is able to cycle a chemistry like Zn-I long term, without any problems, in a reproducible manner. All these hurdles can be overcome though – as there are plenty of examples of people cycling these batteries long term – so it is a matter of arriving at a proper combination of materials and chemistry. Our work continues! Thanks a lot for all your support.

This flow battery kit work is being funded by the Financed by Nlnet’s NGI0 Entrust Fund. We are also collaborating with the FAIR Battery project.

An Open Source DIY Flow battery

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Over the past year, I’ve collaborated with my colleagues Kirk Smith, Sanli Faez, and Joshua Hauser on developing an open-source flow battery design and kit. Our aim is to make it feasible for most individuals to construct this flow battery with readily available parts that can be either purchased online or fabricated affordably. We’re targeting a price point below 1000 EUR, inclusive of the potentiostat, to ensure accessibility.

The kit encompasses all necessary components for constructing and utilizing a flow battery for research and development purposes. This includes the battery itself, pumps, electronic components for pump operation, potentiostat, tubing, reservoirs, and a jig for orderly arrangement. Presently, similar setups cost upwards of 9000 EUR, hence our aspiration for significant cost reduction.

A polypropylene FDM printed prototype being tested with Mn/Fe chemistry. This particular test was done without reservoirs, on close circuit circulation to easily detect any leaking.
Image of one of our latest prototypes. This features polypropylene FDM printed reservoirs, a resin printed cell body and a PLA FDM printed jig.

Throughout this endeavor, we’ve explored various fabrication methods for our designs, employing FDM and resin 3D printing techniques alongside traditional CNC fabrication. While all three methods are viable, our experiments indicate that the most optimal results are achieved through traditional milling.

Charge/discharge cycle using photopaper separators and the Zn-I chemistry using the open source flow battery design.

Validation of our design involved utilizing a low-cost photopaper separator and Zn-I chemistry. We’ve achieved successful charge/discharge cycles at capacities ranging from 20-40 Wh/L. However, long-term cycling validation remains ongoing, as we’ve only been testing the final design for approximately a month.

Our design will be presented at the Flow4UBattery Event in Eindhoven, Netherlands, on April 8-9, 2024. You can register here for free, which also includes complimentary lunch (so please make sure you intend to attend if you subscribe). Day 2 of the event will feature a workshop where participants can assemble a flow battery themselves using the design from our kit. Additionally, we’ll be giving away 5 complete kits during the event, each including mystat potentiostats. We’ll also have a fully assembled kit doing cycling so that you can see the fully assembled kit in action!

After this event, we will look into selling these kits online, with all proceeds going towards the development of higher capacity kits with the objective of reaching an open source flow battery stack within the next 2 years. We will also be publishing the full designs and bill of materials online, so that anyone can create their own too!

Towards a DIY Manganese/Iron flow battery. First experiments using cyclic voltammetry.

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Flow batteries are a great approach for large scale energy storage. While in a battery the amount of energy is constrained by the mass of the anode and the cathode, in a flow battery the cathode and anode are stable electrodes (most commonly graphitic foams) and the energy is stored in solutions that are pumped through these electrodes.

General diagram of a flow battery.

Many of the lowest cost approaches to the chemistry of a flow battery are unable to fully take advantage of this, because they reduce a metal to its solid form on the anode. Approaches using Fe and Zn where this happens are common. The deposition of a solid metal then creates additional issues with both passivation and with dendrites, which can end up shorting the flow battery down the line.

To solve these issues, we need a chemistry where both the oxidation and the reduction happen in solution (with no solid formation on the electrodes). Additionally both of the half-reactions need to be reversible. From a DIY perspective, they should ideally happen under mild conditions and, to make things even more difficult, we need materials that are low cost and that can be easily purchased.

Relative abundance of elements in the earth’s crust

Manganese (Mn) and Iron (Fe) are some of the most common elements on the Earth’s crust, so they fulfill the cost issue. However, when building a flow battery with Mn, we find that the oxidation reactions that Mn is involved in generally involve the formation of insoluble Mn oxides. This happens because Mn3+ is generally unstable in solution and reacts with water to create Mn2+ plus an Mn4+ oxide or hydroxide.

However, a few papers have been published on the use of Na2Mn(EDTA) in flow batteries. This chelate – a commonly available fertilizer – protects the Mn3+ from reacting with water and enhances the reversibility of the reaction. Given the potential where the oxidation of Mn(EDTA)-2 happens, I thought it could certainly be coupled with the reduction of Fe3+ to create a flow battery. Additionally NaFe(EDTA) is also a low cost highly available fertilizer we can use.

On a previous post, I spoke about a setup for electrochemistry that I created, which allows me to carry out several measurements in solution. Using cyclic voltammetry of a solution containing Na2Mn(EDTA) and NaFe(EDTA) I was able to characterize the system and obtain half reaction potential values for the Fe and Mn reactions mentioned above.

Half reactions and half reaction potentials measured Vs an Ag/AgCl reference electrode. For Mn the reduction is shown.
Cyclic voltammetry used to obtain the E1/2 measurements. The Fe reaction happens to the left while the Mn reaction happens to the right.

If we add the two potentials above, we can obtain the expected potential for our battery, which would be 0.74V. This is not very high, which means that the energy density of our flow battery system is going to be low. If we consider the solubility of both compounds, then we expect the power density of this battery to be around 10Wh/L. This means that you would need 100L of 0.5M NaFe(EDTA) and 100L of 0.5M Na2MnEDTA to get a 1kWh battery. This means 18.3kg of the Fe salt and 19.5kg of the Mn salt. You will also need around 35kg of NaCl as a supporting electrolyte.

At retail you can find both Fe and Mn salts for a price of around 6-15 USD/kg (if you buy 25-55lb bags). On the low end this means the cost would be 226.8 USD/kWh and on the high end 567 USD/kWh at a retail price point. In pallet amounts, the cost for both is around 2 USD/kg, so the cost goes down to 75.6 USD kWh. Note that this is only for the Fe and Mn salts.

The challenge is now to create a small electrochemistry setup with two electrochemical chambers separated by an ion exchange membrane where we can carry out some initial charge/discharge measurements and measure the cross-over of ions without the need to do any sort of pumping. This is also going to involve the design of some DIY low cost membranes, since Nafion membranes would be extremely expensive. Additionally, since the conditions are so mild (pH 5-6), we can use some modified PVA or cellulose cation transport membranes that can be produced for very low cost.