Light Rechargeable Redox Flow Batteries

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Stationary energy storage solutions for the grid are becoming increasingly important to store energy from intermittent renewable sources and to meet peak energy consumptioSn demands. Redox flow batteries are attractive for microgrid and solar farm applications. Currently, techniques such as pumped hydro-electric plants are used for storing renewables at this scale, however batteries have advantages in terms of high round trip efficiencies, low maintenance costs and tuneable energy and power outputs. Redox flow batteries are particularly interesting for these large-scale storage applications. Integrating RFBs with solar cells into a single device that can be recharged directly by light presents a possible way of overcoming current prohibitively high costs associated with current systems, which require additional expensive power electronics. These systems are however still poorly understood and substantial work is needed both on the chemistry side to make the electrolytes more stable and on the materials engineering side to fabricate efficient and stable photoelectrodes and scale-up their manufacture. In this PhD project, we will focus on the latter and leverage techniques developed by the nanotech community to fabricate structured carbon electrode structures using a combination of bottom-up and top-down methods and to decorate these with nano photocatalysts.