Dual Power Supply

Kirk Smith’s personal blog

Lab Notebook Entry #14
lab notebook
research
flow batteries
doi
Made an argon sparging/blanketing setup with some equipment I had. Cleaned the setup (took all morning) and built a new cell, let it sparge for an hour, but after I stopped…
Kirk Pollard Smith
Apr 16, 2026

Lab Notebook Entry #13
lab notebook
research
flow batteries
doi

The voltaic bulge of Zn-I appears

Kirk Pollard Smith
Apr 3, 2026

Lab Notebook Entry #12
lab notebook
research
flow batteries
doi

30 cycles, 133 hours, and now a UPS!

Kirk Pollard Smith
Mar 31, 2026

Lab Notebook Entry #11
lab notebook
research
flow batteries
doi

Cell cycled most of weekend, power cut interrupted cycling. 25 cycles, 110 hours, seems stable.

Kirk Pollard Smith
Mar 30, 2026

Managing electrolyte volume imbalance in flow battery testing / Lab Notebook Entry #10
lab notebook
research
flow batteries
doi

16 cycles and 72 hours, signs of periodic self-balancing of electrolyte volumes

Kirk Pollard Smith
Mar 27, 2026

Lab Notebook Entry #9
lab notebook
research
flow batteries
doi

Finally a decent test cell underway

Kirk Pollard Smith
Mar 26, 2026

Lab Notebook Entry #8
lab notebook
research
flow batteries

A less crappy experiment but still need to dial in PP print settings

Kirk Pollard Smith
Mar 23, 2026

Lab Notebook Entry #7
lab notebook
research
flow batteries
doi

Back to wet lab, a crappy experiment to get the cobwebs off

Kirk Pollard Smith
Mar 22, 2026

Improving hardware documentation with FreeCAD, ForgeJo/Codeberg, Markdown… / Lab Notebook Entry #6
lab notebook
research
flow batteries

Moved house again, getting back to it

Kirk Pollard Smith
Mar 18, 2026

Bye Oakland, hello France, some battery updates
personal
research
It’s been a little while, and I am back. Without going into too much personal detail, life dunked on me and my family these past several months, and I moved twice: once…
Kirk Pollard Smith
Sep 16, 2025

Lab Notebook Entry #5
lab notebook
research
flow batteries
Whew. Life, eh?
Kirk Pollard Smith
Jun 10, 2025

Lab Notebook Entry #4
lab notebook
research
flow batteries
Over the last several days I did a few things, including spending a good amount of time recording videos of the cell and jig assembly process. While I was trying to rotate…
Kirk Pollard Smith
May 30, 2025

Lab Notebook Entry #3
lab notebook
research
flow batteries
Had something horrible happen in my family over the weekend, that I don’t want to write about, but I am going to keep writing my notebook here to distract me from real life.
Kirk Pollard Smith
May 19, 2025

Lab Notebook Entry #2
lab notebook
research
flow batteries
First rfb-dev-kit tests with Zn-I chemistry at CCL, repeat Daniel’s results, mark official rfb-dev-kit release, FBRC blog post
Kirk Pollard Smith
May 16, 2025

Lab Notebook Entry #1
lab notebook
research
flow batteries
Going to try even more bite-sized updates of what I do in the lab, as well as write out what I am actually trying do do here. Warning, may be extremely brief/in shorthand.
Kirk Pollard Smith
May 15, 2025

Made a video in FreeCAD
reseach
flow batteries
Made another video about contributing to our project with FreeCAD, since someone had issues opening the assembly files.
Kirk Pollard Smith
May 12, 2025

Made a simple video on assembling the flow cell for FBRC’s development kit
flow batteries
research

Learning video editing, getting in the habit of recording things

Kirk Pollard Smith
Apr 29, 2025

Moved cities, dual power gives me hope amidst crises, setting up research in a community lab
personal
I don’t have much to add to the commentary on the current hellscape of news in the US and around the world, other than that I am trying to be involved with mutual aid…
Kirk Pollard Smith
Apr 24, 2025

The Flowdown #4
flow batteries
doi
research
literature
I added Flux XII, a US aqueous organic RFB company, R-Flo, a Ukrainian all-iron flow battery company, and Unbound Potential, a Swiss membraneless RFB startup, to the list.
Kirk Pollard Smith
Feb 17, 2025

Flow battery YouTubers
research
flow batteries
I am thinking of trying to make some videos on our flow battery project, and came across some other attempts at RFBs on YouTube. I’m a bit loath to make videos, but also, it…
Kirk Pollard Smith
Feb 13, 2025

Micro book review of Electrify: An Optimist’s Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future by Saul Griffith
personal
I read this book [1] a couple years ago and realized I could turn my thoughts on it into a short blog post.
Kirk Pollard Smith
Feb 13, 2025

The fediverse works
research

Two forum softwares diverged in a yellow wood

Kirk Pollard Smith
Feb 5, 2025

Notes on UK RFB conference
flow batteries
research
doi

I want a Jaffa cake

Kirk Pollard Smith
Jan 27, 2025

List of flow battery companies
flow batteries
research
doi

and suppliers, R&D outfits, etc.

Kirk Pollard Smith, Andrew A. Wang
Jan 27, 2025

I’m an independent scientist now!
flow batteries
personal
research
doi

And trying to find funding

Kirk Pollard Smith
Jan 21, 2025

Response to our open-source flow battery project on Hacker News, Hackaday: haters, fans, time to get to work!
flow batteries
Someone shared our project on Hacker News. Which is cool! They shared my individual blog though, and not the project page, so most traffic went to my tiny home server (which…
Kirk Pollard Smith
Oct 14, 2024

The Flowdown #3
flow batteries
research
literature
I have quite the backlog of (flow) battery articles and energy storage-related posts to get through. I won’t be diving particularly deep on any of these pieces for the…
Kirk Pollard Smith
Sep 1, 2024

The Flowdown #2
flow batteries
research
literature
I don’t want to sound pessimistic. But Form Energy has benefited immensely from the MIT / Yet-Min Chiang / Mateo Jaramillo / Ex-Tesla hype-sphere, and I will wait to be…
Kirk Pollard Smith
Aug 10, 2024

Image from linked article of a flow battery at a tradeshow

The Flowdown #1
flow batteries
doi
research
literature

My idea to have a regular informal communication on academic papers and commercial activity that catches my eye in flow batteries and related fields

Kirk Pollard Smith
May 4, 2024

Pack-level energy density of Li-ion/Na-ion batteries
intercalation batteries
research
I came across acculon energy recently and saw that they are a US-based manufacturer who appear to be manufacturing their own in-house Li-ion and Na-ion cells, and providing…
Kirk Pollard Smith
May 3, 2024

Desktop browser screenshot of https://fbrc.dev

Set up website for our flow battery project, FBRC
personal
research
flow batteries
My collaborator Daniel at https://chemisting.com/ and I have setup an “organization” (not a legal entity) in order to apply for funding for our open-source battery project…
Kirk Pollard Smith
Apr 27, 2024

Screenshot of Codeberg repository for this blog

Blog source code now on Codeberg
personal
I’ve put the source code of my blog on Codeberg here, in case anyone wants to see how I’ve set things up. I host this on a small ARM board in my apartment using Yunohost and…
Kirk Pollard Smith
Apr 27, 2024

Presentation slides for flow battery workshop in the Netherlands
research
flow batteries
Prof. Sanli Faez of Utrecht University and his FAIR Battery project graciously hosted the Flow Battery Research Collective at Eindhoven University for the Flow4UBattery…
Kirk Pollard Smith
Apr 17, 2024

Icon of rotating bolt, logo for GB3D library

Presenting interactive CAD files in static HTML files
research
Thanks to Julian Stirling, you can embed CAD models and animations in static HTML with the GB3D viewer.
Kirk Pollard Smith
Apr 7, 2024

Exploded view of the cell

An open-source flow battery kit
flow batteries
research
doi
Edit: This blog post has received a lot of traffic thanks to a Hacker News post. For the latest updates on this project, please check out https://fbrc.dev/, where we have a…
Kirk Pollard Smith
Mar 18, 2024

A latex glove covering a smoke detector

Catharsis, and how I was radicalized by British landlords
personal
One of the reasons I wanted to start a blog was screaming into the void of the internet catharsis. I don’t plan for many posts to be this ranty, but I have been meaning to…
Kirk Pollard Smith
Mar 8, 2024

Figure from Malhotra and Schmidt 2020, showing degree of design complexity vs need for customization

Motivation for an open-source flow battery
flow batteries
research
doi
Towards the end of 2022 I drafted this, consider it a work in progress - it was before I had joined forces with Daniel to form the Flow Battery Research Collective
Kirk Pollard Smith
Feb 26, 2024
 
I’m building a home lab
research
I feel very “behind” on things right now. I defended my PhD in January 2022, and I am still, a year and a half later, in the process of converting some of the chapters to…
Kirk Pollard Smith
Jul 6, 2023
 
Setting up the MYSTAT potentiostat for development
research
While searching for an open-source potentiostat, I found the blog https://chemisting.com/, and discovered another home scientist, Daniel, working on (flow) batteries, who…
Kirk Pollard Smith
Jul 6, 2023
 
Hello, world
personal
I am starting a blog/website for a few reasons, both well-considered and poorly defined:
Kirk Pollard Smith
Jun 20, 2023
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