Flow Battery Research Collective

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!

@danielfp248 that makes a lot of sense. Being a complete newb, I slowly gather an understanding of the individual components of the cell.

Thanks for the good explanations! Now I need to actually source alls those parts!

Could you please document how the potentiostat is connected to the cell? Is it connected only on the two current collectors? Does that not mean that you could substitute it using a constant voltage source and just log current?

Sorry, I'm a total newcomer in battery testing, so this might be obvious to others.

Thanks a lot for the digging! You're probably right about getting potentiostat. I got the quote from PCBWay down to around 314$ for one fully assembled PCB and 4 extra ones. This is acceptable for me even if still quite expensive. I guess I could drive down the cost by ordering and soldering on the expensive parts by myself.

I ordered most parts now. Fingers crossed they are correct. I went for the Ti foil instead of the graphoil since it was way cheaper. Fingers crossed