Rethinking Redox Flow Batteries

对气候变化和城市污染的担忧促使我们改变目前对石油、煤炭和天然气能源的过度依赖。技术进步使得从“可再生“能源--太阳能、风能、潮汐能--中提取能源变得更加容易，但这些能源的一个明显特征是它们的间歇性，因此只有在有办法储存这些能源的情况下，它们才能被可靠地利用。电不能储存，但电可以用来驱动电化学反应，将电能储存为化学能。这是电池的基础--因此，利用电化学手段实现高效储能是英国乃至所有发达经济体面临的最突出的技术挑战之一。 基于锂离子电池（LIB）技术的小型设备在过去十年中已经彻底改变了移动的设备的功率要求。在当前的十年中，随着对LIB动力汽车的兴趣（和销售）的增加，电动车辆的能量存储方法正在发生转变。下一个挑战是将储能过程“扩大”到电网的规模-我们能否开发大型电池，使我们能够为房屋，学校和工厂储存大量电力？英国拥有丰富的（潜在的）风能，潮汐和波浪资源：尽管在利用这些资源方面存在技术挑战，但也需要开发更便宜的电池，这些电池不一定基于LIB技术-因为电池本身是固定的，所以它们的质量和尺寸变得不如它们的成本和寿命重要。该提案旨在开发一种称为氧化还原液流电池的替代电池技术的基础，该电池是为大规模存储而设计的。该提案并不寻求开发一种在项目结束时即可部署的电池，需要进一步优化和工程研究才能实现这一目标。相反，我们寻求开发基本的科学原理，这可能导致更好的性能（在能量，成本和寿命方面）氧化还原液流电池-基于我们提出的两个进展：一个是开发“无膜”液流电池，另一个是开发新型材料用作电池膜。

Concerns about climate change and urban pollution have prompted a shift from our current over-reliance on energy derived from oil, coal and gas. Technological advances have made it easier to extract energy from "renewable " sources - solar, wind, tidal - however a defining feature of such sources is their intermittent nature, so they can only be reliably exploited if there are ways to store that energy. Electricity cannot be stored, but electricity can be used to drive electrochemical reactions which store the electrical energy as chemical energy. This is the basis of a battery - achieving efficient energy storage, using electrochemical means, is therefore one of the most prominent technological challenges facing the UK and, indeed, all advanced economies. Small scale devices based on lithium ion battery (LIB) technology have revolutionised power requirements for mobile devices over the last decade. In the current decade, a shift in energy storage methods for electric vehicles is underway with increasing interest (and sales) of LIB powered cars . The next challenge is to "scale up" the energy storage process to the scale of the electrical grid - can we develop large scale batteries which would enable us to store large amounts of electricity to power houses, schools and factories? The UK is blessed with ample (potential) wind, tidal and wave resources: although there are technical challenges involved in harnessing these resources, there is also a need to develop cheaper batteries which would not necessarily be based on LIB technology - because the batteries themselves would be stationary, so their mass and size becomes less important than their cost and lifetime. This proposal seeks to develop the basis of an alternative battery technology called the redox flow battery which is designed for large-scale storage. The proposal does not seek to develop a battery which would be ready to deploy at the end of the project, further optimisation and engineering studies would be required to achieve such a goal. Rather we seek to develop the fundamental scientific principles which could lead to better performing (in terms of energy, cost and lifetime) redox flow batteries - based on two advances we propose: one which develops a "membrane-free" flow battery, the other develops novel types of materials to be used as the battery membranes.