vanadium redox flow battery

[wurst]

heh people, today i read some very nice story.

its a story of regenerative energy such as solar or wind power that cant be used seriously cause these sources are inconstant.
ideas for storage of electrical power are needed.
now theres some new "battery" coming up, using a very cheap and innovative mechanism:

-the ions that carry the load are located in a liquid.
this gives the battery the unique feature to be equipped with a big storage.

-the two liquids are now exactly of the same material. its archieved by 4 different states of vanadium:
the electrolyte in the positive half contains VO+ and VO2+ ions, the electrolyte in the negative half-cells, V3+ and V2+ ions.
this means: infinite life of the battery, the electrolyte will be same OK like on the first day. in 500 Jears.

-vanadium is cheap. its devided from the FE in conventional mining.

-no poison like on lead, cadmium, mercury etc.

-the battery can store and release the energy same fast, fucking fast btw.

Now comes the weired point...
the liquids are devided by a permeable membrane, some australian uni hold the patent for that. without an effective membrane you cant make the battery run since on one hand the liquids may mix (then u loose load) or the current cant pass (then u have high internal resistance, at 1,4V thats no joke)

theres maybe 5 producers of these cells worldwide, everything is including licenses so fucking expensive that one of them allready went insolvent.
so if someone got an idea bout this membrane: i swear theres a way to get real rich.
maybe theres some ways to archieve something with a local electrical field on the membrane, using physical stream in the liquid to transport the V back to where it came from. similar to deviding different grains in a centrifuge...

whatever i read now 12h bout it, just needed to tell it someone.
such a crap, 1 second before we can make regenerative energy seriously usable they fuck it off...

btw: with 75 m2 solar panels u could drive a little car, since energy is transportable like fuel, allthough all shoud be pretty heavy since we deal with 25Wh/Kg (LiIon~100-150Wh/Kg)

[SanHolo]

so if someone got an idea bout this membrane: i swear theres a way to get real rich.

That's the real catch, isn't it? Developing such a membrane is net trivial, I bet there are some already trying this, because they know there's real money behind it. :*)

[natirips]

I would envy you for the rest of my days if you got rich as easy as that.

For the membrane, shouldn't something as simple as stainless steel do?

[AimMe]

I think you should ask someone who's good in chemistry. Who knows what kind of reactions can happen when vanadium touches something like steel. And will ions escape somehow.

[wurst]

hm, principially an old jogging pants could do the job, just not so very effective.
if now the one side (on the positive side) would be a small electric field and a constant liquid stream parallel to that (imperfect jogging pants) membrane...

whatever i must go check where i can buy electrolyte and some old aquarium after september. shouldnt be that big money...

[SanHolo]

hm, principially an old jogging pants could do the job

Hahahahaha, great! :*D :*D

Some of the equipment in our lab has membranes with different characteristics, and they are fucking expensive. And as you said, there's a lot of money to win, so rest assured that there are MANY labs trying to find a suitable membrane. ;*)

[wurst]

what means that nobody sucker like us for sure can make such.
thats why id like to test along with some cheaper membrane and else deviding powers like a combination of electric field and flow

[SanHolo]

You can try, but to create a proton exchange membrane you'll most likely need ionomers (see e.g. here: http://www.pslc.ws/mactest/ionomer.htm), and you need quite some dedicated stuff to develop and manufacture these.

For the membrane, shouldn't something as simple as stainless steel do?

That would be no membrane, but a barrier. And the battery would discharge immediately; steel is a conductive material, the ions would just go through.

[SteveMcqueen]

pscht! :>

[wurst]

ich meld mich dann wieder wenn ich das passende aquarium in der zeitung gefunden habe. naja, vielleicht besser eine pe- wanne, geht ja immerhin um schwefelsäure.
wenns grundsätzlich funktioniert gibts nen solarquadratmeter und einen wechselrichter dazu. wäre mal gespannt ob man sich umweltfreundlich nachts rasieren kann...