Flow Battery Research Collective

New member here.

I'm a Scottish engineer based in London.

I'm a member of London Hackspace, and a few of us have been talking about working together assembling a dev-kit. With the tools that we have available, we would be able to work on designs with a larger form-factor...

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I came across this project via Mastodon, and just finished watching the FOSDEM 2025 talk.

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One of the problems you mentioned during the talk, was the materials used in the components, being reactive with the liquids.

When you mentioned the pump failure due to this, i recalled this instructable for a 3d-printed water pump:

https://www.instructables.com/3D-Printed-Powerful-Water-Pump-That-Is-Portable/

Whether this design of pump has the optimum flows for the battery system is a separate question, but as it's manufacturable from a standard electric motor, and printable components.

As they are printable, they can be made using your choice of printable materials, so that would avoid some of the problems you have already found.

Looking forward to trying these out.

@kirk

Having the extra sensors makes more sense from the perspective of prototyping/experimenting.

Once the design moves towards the stable-release version, the number could be reduced, so the measurements are mostly the metrics needed to troubleshoot operations and ensure safety.

I've seen this approach used in the catering industry, for larger-scale manufacturing of sweets and pastries.

The intial prototypes had way more sensors than the versions that were installed on the factory floor.

Also, the food-safe pump designs will be worth looking at. As they are designed to conform with the food-hygiene standards, they'll operate to a known standard of predictability in their behaviour, so it will reduce the random factors involved when experimenting with designs.

As they are simple discrete modules, even in the larger assembly-lines, they'll fit nicely in the user-process-flow when things start to move towards the design-for-manufacturability stage.

Reading the posts about the different pump designs, it makes more sense.

More background reading to do.

TY

@kirk

This design of pump connection is very common in the industrial-catering machine-design industry.

This would be a source of reasonably-priced pumps, that are designed to be maintained.