New member introduction thread!
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Hey everyone, i just read an article about your project on a german tech site and watched your fosdem video and I'm super stoked about this project. I've been interested in energy storage and in particular flow batteries since years and envisioned building one at some point. Unfortunately just by reading academic paper, I couldn't go forward so I gave up. That's why I'm super excited to see that someone did the tough work of creating libre plans for an experimental cell.
I'm an electical and computer science engineer by training but more of a programmer and sysadmin by trade. On top of that I'm a 3d printing enthusiast (sometimes going as far as writing my own albeit simple slicer) with quite some experience with FreeCAD. I'm based in Luxembourg so I hope I can source all the required materials easily.
I'll try to build the experimental cell in the upcoming months if time and motivation lasts and family life allows it to. After and during that process I would love to give you feedback (and maybe improve) on the documentation.
I already miss two sections which I unfortunately cannot supply. 1. Flow battery basics 2. Operation of the flow battery.
In the future I would love to store my excess PV power in my basement using my self built cell :D.
Congrats on this excellent project!
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Hello,
my name is Jens, and I am from Germany, lower rhine area. I am a chemical engineer, more or less retired. During my active time I had to work with the design, realisation, commissioning, automatisation and trouble shooting of evaporation and crystallisation plants, some of them with high corrosive liquid phases. I had to deal with a large number of pumps, tiny dosing pumps up 30.000 m³/h axial pumps.
This is only to give an overview of my not so academical background. I got curious by reading an article at heise.de / MIT Technology Review 12/2020. So here I am, feeding my curiosity and maybe I can help. Who knows.
Best regards
Jens
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I forgot to mention my hobbies: Mostly 3D printing and maker scene.
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Welcome @jo.foe, @sepi, Jens (@Salzmann0704), and Timothy (@Vorg) ! It's great to have you all join the forum, many thanks for your interest in our collective project.
No worries about your not-perfect English @jo.foe, quite a few of us are not native English speakers ourselves.
Glad to have you all here.
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Hi, I am Tobi from south Germany. I have found out about the community by searching Google for information about redox flow batteries.
I need a big capacity energy storage for my current project, an electric self sustaining yacht.
The safety of Flow batteries makes them a very attractive choice to me although I do not know yet if energy density and output might fit my needs. But all of my questions for sure will be answered here
If you are keen to see the project, you are welcome to visit me at x.com/dreamhydrogen
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Hi, I am Tobi from south Germany. I have found out about the community by searching Google for information about redox flow batteries.
I need a big capacity energy storage for my current project, an electric self sustaining yacht.
The safety of Flow batteries makes them a very attractive choice to me although I do not know yet if energy density and output might fit my needs. But all of my questions for sure will be answered hereIf you are keen to see the project, you are welcome to visit me at x.com/dreamhydrogen
@HydrogenDream Thanks for joining! Flow batteries have quite low energy density relative to other technologies, so I don't believe they are a right fit for a boat. For this the best practical solution is most likely going to be lithium iron phosphate batteries. These are quite safe and their energy density is a much better fit, especially given the limited space available on a boat.
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Also sloshing of large amounts lf liquids might be a problem, both fir stability but maybe also for the battery itself. I guess it all depends on your goals. It it needs to be practical and working tomorrow, LiFePo is probably the way to go. If you have other goals, maybe look further into flow batteries.
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Hi, Christian here form Germany, Lower Saxony. I'm a senior software developer and like to play around with electronics, MCUs, ESPs, FreeCAD, 3D printing, milling, and anything else what you can DIY. I'm looking for some ideas to pimp up the energy storage capabilities of my PV setup since 1yr. There are so many ideas including compressed air storage, flywheels, thermal storage, and of course batteries / fuel cells. So I'm reading and viewing tons of research papers and DIY videos regarding this. As some others here, I found the reference to this project on heise.de.
I plan to start with the 3D printing soon. Thanks a lot for all the updates of all of your progress on building the kit. Once I'm ready to start I will also share my experiences during the build and hopefully test process.
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Hi, Christian here form Germany, Lower Saxony. I'm a senior software developer and like to play around with electronics, MCUs, ESPs, FreeCAD, 3D printing, milling, and anything else what you can DIY. I'm looking for some ideas to pimp up the energy storage capabilities of my PV setup since 1yr. There are so many ideas including compressed air storage, flywheels, thermal storage, and of course batteries / fuel cells. So I'm reading and viewing tons of research papers and DIY videos regarding this. As some others here, I found the reference to this project on heise.de.
I plan to start with the 3D printing soon. Thanks a lot for all the updates of all of your progress on building the kit. Once I'm ready to start I will also share my experiences during the build and hopefully test process.
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Hi, Christian here form Germany, Lower Saxony. I'm a senior software developer and like to play around with electronics, MCUs, ESPs, FreeCAD, 3D printing, milling, and anything else what you can DIY. I'm looking for some ideas to pimp up the energy storage capabilities of my PV setup since 1yr. There are so many ideas including compressed air storage, flywheels, thermal storage, and of course batteries / fuel cells. So I'm reading and viewing tons of research papers and DIY videos regarding this. As some others here, I found the reference to this project on heise.de.
I plan to start with the 3D printing soon. Thanks a lot for all the updates of all of your progress on building the kit. Once I'm ready to start I will also share my experiences during the build and hopefully test process.
@czahl Welcome to the community Christian! We look forward to your fabrication journey. Please feel free to open up a thread to share your progress with us, that way it will be easier for you to ask questions as you advance and build a successful kit.
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@czahl Hello Christian, are you my clone? I could have writtent that message except for the location and Name :D. Anyways, I whish you a warm welcome, fun an patience building your kit!
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@czahl Welcome to the community Christian! We look forward to your fabrication journey. Please feel free to open up a thread to share your progress with us, that way it will be easier for you to ask questions as you advance and build a successful kit.
@danielfp248 Thanks, I will follow your recommendation. I will open a new thread for this - but first I need to find some extra time to get started
. One first step (done today) is to order some PP filament for my Bamboo and to learn who to print it. Once started I will document my experience in the same thread then... -
Hi all, I'm Muntasir, a doctoral student in chemical engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts the USA. I just started perusing your work - I found it on an Autodesk Research lecture you guys did.
I'm a doctoral student in chemical engineering focusing specifically on scaleup and electrode design of flow batteries (the general idea is - if you start from absolutely nothing, can we get a general idea of electrode properties, dimensions, etc. that would lead to specific power/capacity/cost benchmarks, agnostic to chemistry?) Most of my expertise is tying very parsimonious models to practical performance metrics/experimental data, specifically for all-iron and iron-air chemistries. I'm happy to lend some of my experience (if not at least point folks toward useful resources)!
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A belated welcome @HydrogenDream, @czahl, and @muntasirms !
@muntasirms said in New member introduction thread!:
I just started perusing your work - I found it on an Autodesk Research lecture you guys did.
Ah great, I'm glad somebody watched that
. For the curious, the talk is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIDwj2noVrI@muntasirms said in New member introduction thread!:
I'm happy to lend some of my experience (if not at least point folks toward useful resources)!
We could definitely use your expertise! I'm also curious to hear your thoughts on the practicality/feasibility of some of the all-iron/iron-air approaches. We'd like to start some more modeling efforts once we're able to run tests in the large-format cell.
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K kirk forked this topic
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Hi All,
Tim here. I'm a software engineer by trade with some electronics/hardware/electrical knowledge (no chemistry to speak of though). I'm interested in flow batteries because I think they are in general a better idea for long-term stationary energy storage than lithium. I've had three+ years experience at my home with Redflow ZCells hooked up to Victron inverter/charger gear, and have written rather a lot of blog posts about this, some of which @kirk has quoted here in the past. The latest is https://ourobengr.com/2025/08/yeah-that-went-well/ which includes some speculation about why Redflow's zinc bromine flow batteries may fail, and some possible mitigations. Not sure exactly how best I can help yet, but I'd love to see an open source flow battery get off the ground
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Hi All,
Tim here. I'm a software engineer by trade with some electronics/hardware/electrical knowledge (no chemistry to speak of though). I'm interested in flow batteries because I think they are in general a better idea for long-term stationary energy storage than lithium. I've had three+ years experience at my home with Redflow ZCells hooked up to Victron inverter/charger gear, and have written rather a lot of blog posts about this, some of which @kirk has quoted here in the past. The latest is https://ourobengr.com/2025/08/yeah-that-went-well/ which includes some speculation about why Redflow's zinc bromine flow batteries may fail, and some possible mitigations. Not sure exactly how best I can help yet, but I'd love to see an open source flow battery get off the ground@tserong Thanks Tim great job on your blog btw! You are perhaps the only person online documenting the experience of using a true large scale flow battery system.
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Hi All,
Tim here. I'm a software engineer by trade with some electronics/hardware/electrical knowledge (no chemistry to speak of though). I'm interested in flow batteries because I think they are in general a better idea for long-term stationary energy storage than lithium. I've had three+ years experience at my home with Redflow ZCells hooked up to Victron inverter/charger gear, and have written rather a lot of blog posts about this, some of which @kirk has quoted here in the past. The latest is https://ourobengr.com/2025/08/yeah-that-went-well/ which includes some speculation about why Redflow's zinc bromine flow batteries may fail, and some possible mitigations. Not sure exactly how best I can help yet, but I'd love to see an open source flow battery get off the ground
