Light Rechargeable Redox Flow Batteries

电网的固定储能解决方案对于存储来自间歇性可再生能源的能源和满足峰值能源消耗需求变得越来越重要。氧化还原液流电池对微电网和太阳能农场应用具有吸引力。目前，抽水水力发电厂等技术被用于这种规模的可再生能源存储，然而，电池在往返效率高、维护成本低、能量和功率输出可调方面具有优势。氧化还原液流电池对于这些大规模存储应用特别有趣。将rfb与太阳能电池集成到一个单一的设备中，可以直接通过光充电，这是一种可能的方法，可以克服目前与当前系统相关的过高成本，这些系统需要额外昂贵的电力电子设备。然而，这些系统仍然知之甚少，需要在化学方面进行大量的工作，以使电解质更加稳定，并在材料工程方面制造高效稳定的光电极并扩大其生产规模。在这个博士项目中，我们将专注于后者，并利用纳米技术界开发的技术，使用自下而上和自上而下的方法相结合来制造结构化的碳电极结构，并用纳米光催化剂来修饰这些结构。

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.