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 roadmap, FAQ, forum, etc.
My collaborator Daniel shared an update on his blog about our the progress of our open-source flow battery kit, so I thought I’d do the same. This was motivated by my previous post [1]. We’ve been working together with Prof Sanli Faez and Josh Hausener at Utrecht University on their FAIR Battery Project, though the repository for my cell design and jig is currently here. Daniel and I are contributing as independent scientists on our own time in our own abodes.
I recently finished some preliminary renderings of the cell shown here:
Daniel has mostly worked on optimizing a suitable zinc-iodine chemistry and choosing some widely available, affordable materials to build the cell with. I’ve worked mostly on the cell design and CAD.
For some scientists doing flow battery experiments in their respective homes/apartments, we’ve got some solid preliminary results— not bad in terms of capacity and efficiency, in the sense that we are in the right order of magnitude of real-world electrolytes here, and we’re using paper instead of an ion-exchange membrane!
From Daniel:
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!
References
Citation
@online{pollard_smith2024,
author = {Pollard Smith, Kirk},
title = {An Open-Source Flow Battery Kit},
date = {2024-03-18},
url = {https://dualpower.supply/posts/rfb-kit-workshop/},
doi = {10.59350/kda2j-xan48},
langid = {en}
}