Real-Time Monitoring and Advanced Characterization of Vanadium Flow Batteries using In-Situ Techniques

Project Description

Ireland's Climate Action Plan proposes 70% of electricity from renewable sources by 2030. This will require flexible large-scale storage systems. Vanadium flow batteries (VFBs) have emerged as particularly promising to meet these challenges. Consequently this technology has had an explosive growth, attracting investment from companies like United Technologies and Sumitomo. As a consequence of its rapid growth the technology has outpaced the fundamental scientific understanding and many important inquiries need investigation if technological progress is to be maintained. Furthermore, the monitoring of these systems is key to their efficient and rapid operation. Dr Lynch's group has made seminal contributions to fundamental and applied VFB research. The present project will extend their work, exploiting recent advances in VFB monitoring. We propose to develop in-situ optical and electrochemical monitoring techniques to quantitatively investigate the electrochemical and physical processes occurring during cell operation, and enable an understanding of the factors limiting performance. This is important in order to provide a quantitative basis on which to develop the next generation of VFBs. Laboratory-scale VFBs will be instrumented with spectroscopic and electrochemical probes to obtain detailed experimental measurements. Arrays of fibre-optic-based probes will be incorporated to monitor in situ the electrolytes' UV-visible spectroscopy. From these probes, three-dimensional maps will be obtained of the redox species within the porous, carbon-felt electrodes during actual cell operation. We will perform complementary experiments using a range of electrochemical techniques and use our data to test and improve the accuracy of computational models of VFBs.