Rethinking Redox Flow Batteries

对气候变化和城市污染的担忧促使我们改变了目前对石油、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、潮汐能源--中提取能源变得更加容易，然而，这种能源的一个显著特点是其间歇性，因此只有在有办法储存这些能量的情况下，才能可靠地利用它们。电不能储存，但电可以用来驱动电化学反应，电化学反应将电能储存为化学能。这是电池的基础--使用电化学方法实现高效的能量存储，因此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。在过去的十年里，基于锂离子电池(Lib)技术的小型设备彻底改变了移动设备的电力需求。在当前的十年中，随着人们对LIB动力汽车的兴趣(和销售)的增加，电动汽车的储能方式正在发生转变。下一个挑战是将能量存储过程“放大”到电网的规模--我们能否开发出大规模电池，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、潮汐和海浪资源：尽管利用这些资源涉及技术挑战，但也有必要开发不一定基于LiB技术的更便宜的电池-因为电池本身是固定的，所以它们的质量和大小变得不像它们的成本和寿命那么重要。这项提议寻求开发一种名为氧化还原液流电池的替代电池技术的基础，该电池旨在用于大规模存储。该提案并不寻求开发在项目结束时可以部署的电池，但需要进一步的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，以提高氧化还原液流电池的性能(在能源、成本和寿命方面)--基于我们提出的两项进展：一项是开发“无膜”液流电池，另一项是开发用作电池膜的新型材料。

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.