Battery news typically covers the latest, greatest laboratory or industry breakthroughs to push modern devices further and faster. Could you build your own flow battery stationary storage for home-built solar and wind rigs though?
Based on the concept of appropriate technology, the system from the Flow Battery Research Collective will be easy to construct, easy to maintain, and safe to operate in a residential environment. Current experiments are focusing on Zn/I chemistry, but other aqueous chemistries could be used in the future. Instead of an ion exchange membrane, the battery uses readily attainable photo paper and is already showing similar order of magnitude performance to lab-developed cells.
Any components that aren’t off-the-shelf have been designed in FreeCAD. While they can be 3D printed, the researchers have found traditional milling yields better results which isn’t too surprising when you need something water-tight. More work is needed, but it is promising work toward a practical, DIY-able energy storage solution.
If you’re looking to build your own open source wind turbine or solar cells to charge up a home battery system, then we’ve got you covered. You can also break the chains of the power grid with off-the-shelf parts.
I can’t actually find where it says what kind of power it makes at what kind of flows.. Am I blind? I want to know!! Whats the performance?
Looks like an in progress proof of concept… The section about testing the cell have only TODO on it.
But looking at the 5 grams of zync on the bill of materials, don’t expect to power more than a calculator with it…
it’d be nice if it could make enough power to run its own pumps.
*Zinc
If I push a copper and an iron nail in an apple i have a proof of concept also (and may be able to power a calculator).
Working but useless, and for sure not scalable. 3D printing and paper filters doesn’t give any confidence that it can lead to a real product (that should run for years without major issues).
Fair, except you cannot recharge the apple…
You could grow a new apple while tossing the old one to decompose into fertilizer… Technically solar recharging!
Isn’t “Proof of Concept” also called Vaporware ? 😁
Oh wait…”Proof of Concept” is Entremaneur speak for….hey government give me lots of grants that I don’t have to pay back for something that doesn’t really work.
“3D printing and paper filters”
Paper is used as a membrane like, everywhere. They’re inside friggin’ electrolytic caps!
3D printed prototypes are practically the industry standard at this point.
the details are found here:
https://fbrc.codeberg.page/rfb-dev-kit/
Referenced early on in the article
Yeah, the link that should be here is this:
https://fbrc.dev/posts/Flow4U-conference/
That’s what those instructions are for. What they’re trying to do is essentially bootstrap development of it, since the commercial offerings aren’t even really buyable, and the academic cells have a lot of variations and aren’t cheap benchtop-testable either.
The test kits BOM is 500 euro. That’s a lot of lemons and pennies …
Hey, Kirk here, one of the scientists working on this. It’s very, very much a work-in-progress and we’ve yet to mark our first release, so please bear that in mind. This first kit is solely for R&D and educational use. Afterwards we plan to develop an actual stack and full flow battery system. We plan to explore multiple chemistries. We were hoping to be in Hackaday eventually but weren’t expecting this attention now! We prefer to work in the open and give updates as they come. In several weeks time I’ll be leaving my current job to do this full-time, until now it’s been a side project for a few of us in our respective apartments. Happy to answer any questions, and thanks for checking us out!
Nice! Along way to go obviously, but such a great idea. Good luck! I’ll be following your progress with interest.
Everything starts somewhere.
Keep going Kirk.
There is a Sierra Gordo mine in California. The owner of the mine is a YouTuber and he’s a younger person who bought the mine with some investors. They’re building a hotel and developing it into a social network location. But they have lots and lots of zinc. This might be an interesting project for them and he’s just the kind of guy to consider doing something like a flow battery using zinc that he already has on-site