Flow Battery Research Collective

That sounds like even more exciting that I expected. @danielfp248 could you put this and a description of the wirering into the docs?

Good luck @gus . I'm rooting for you and am exited to see your first results!

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

@Vorg I did my homework and research the material but sourcing mostly industrial use material can be challenging as an amateur. Especially since the manufacturer in this case is from the USA and I'm in Europe.

@danielfp248 thanks so much for the comprehensive write-up. I had hoped to be more accurate :D. Maybe you should have those links in the BOM page.

Hello all, I'm trying to gather parts but I'm not sure about some of the suppliers/products I have an eye on. Could you maybe give me some feedback about the following products? (I also added more specific questions to the screenshots).

Also, do you have any good sources for the chemical reagents that are accessible to amateurs?

Did I understand correctly that there is a 12V and a 24V version with vastly different prices? The 12V one is 17€ while the 12/24V one 68€?

Many thanks for your help!

My latest quote is 315$ with assembly included by PCBWay. That's expensive but not prohibitive. Thanks for the input!

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

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.

@quinnale said in Towards a working system:

Aluminum might(?) be a bit more susceptible to corrosion/passivization at the surface.

So many things to try out

I just noticed that I got a detailed quote with a price for each part. It seems that I requested a quote for the assembly and parts for 5 potentiostats (5 is the minimum PCB order quantity). So only oredering parts and assembly of one PCB should cut cost to something more reasonable.

I wouldn't mind a little diagram but don't go grazy (unless you would want o integrate it into the docs).

About the necessity of the potentiostat: I mainly ask since it's unfortinately not as easy to get and also quite expensive (>200€). I think I might just try building the rest of the cell first. That way, if I get demotivated midway, I won't have a "useless" potentiostat sitting around

@quinnale ok, thanks but then aluminium could work too, or not?

I guess that both injection molding and casting don't allow for fancy internal geomtries needed for the manifolds.

@quinnale Hah, that's the spirit. I'm happy someone likes to go the hacky route, just like I might try. Btw, is it relevant to have brass, or would more pure copper work the same?

@quinnale Ahh, that makes sense to me. So I'd really use the potentiostat as a fancy DC power supply plus current logger in this case? I didn't miss a third electrode on the cell that could be connected as a reference potential?

I tried ordering the MyStat off of PCBWay assembled and it seems like the components cost almost 1k$. Is this normal? Could I leave out a component and have the component cost come down to a normal price range? Did you always solder the components on yourselves?

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

Thanks for the quick reply! About 1): why does the flow frame need to be closed? Could you not have two "layers" of a sandwich. One being milled with the fields and one bein just a sheet. Would that create leakage and manufacturing complexity issues? 2) Yeah, I don't know enough about chemistry to really asess this. 3) that's surprising but also maybe not that much.