New member introduction thread!

[quinnale]

Hi all, I am Alex Quinn, a 6th year Ph.D. candidate experimental researcher in the Brushett Group at MIT.

I've run into your website before, but your presentation at our workshop on flow battery reproducibility inspired me to join this forum. I hope to reproduce some of your efforts. Ideally in the future I can provide feedback and support in items like testing, design, machining, and visibility. I'd be happy to chat more about how I can incrementally contribute as I explore more. Keep up this cool work!

Thanks again Kirk for presenting to us, and for the opportunity to be a part of this community!

[kirk]

@quinnale Hey, thanks for joining Alex and welcome! Let's set up a chat - send us an email at info@fbrc.dev and we can set something up - would be very happy to hear what you're up to and how we can collaborate. We have our regular meetings weekly on Thursdays from 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM EST, but I won't be able to attend tomorrow's unfortunately.

[quinnale]

@kirk Fantastic, dropped you an email. Didn't have a chance to make this one but I will try to attend one in the future!

[lucas]

Hi! I just watched your talk at the 2025 Open Hardware Summit. I am a power electronics engineer. If you like any support from that side or electronics in general I can help. I only have very rudimentary knowledge about chemistry, but a strong interest in battery tech. I would like to replicate your work and get a battery up and running at some point.

[kirk]

@lucas welcome! We will be doing more power electronics as the project continues, see some of the discussions and diagrams elsewhere in the forum here for example. We plan to experiment with some of the OSHW power electronics options from OwnTech for our large-format cell/stack: https://www.owntech.io/

[jo.foe]

Hi, I'm long time a observer of this theme and frustrating about complicated thinking and crashes of developing companies behind. It's mostly a too complicated thinking behind.
I'm happy to find this open source community, open for many users to think about this important technology!

Sorry for my not perfect english anytime!

Greetings

[sepi]

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!

[Salzmann0704]

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

[Salzmann0704]

I forgot to mention my hobbies: Mostly 3D printing and maker scene.

[Vorg]

Hi, Timothy from the US. Casual interest in the project. Would like to build a battery for house backup at some point, but give the additional cost of inverters and solar for charging, permits, etc., it's likely more of a pipe dream.

[kirk]

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.