Grid Think

After 3 months of troubleshooting, researching on All iron hybrid redox flow battery patents, research paper, white papers and ESS Inc videos, I gave up on Iron chemistry, but not entirely, Iron is still dirt cheap, it is still universally available. The effort to result ratio did not make sense for all iron battery, you fight iron needles (or dendrites), hydrogen evolution, make complex systems to manage both, laser weld you stack to make it leak proof. After all this, you will get a battery that wastes half of the energy it consumes. So I honestly, thought, there has got to be a better way, a better chemistry that still uses dirt cheap Iron, but does not have needles or GOD-AWFUL efficiency. Who's manufacturing is not rocket science, something much closer to Vanadium, because, well let's be honest, Vanadium is amazing, despite being out of budget. To my surprise, it wasn't a novel chemistry, rather an old one, which I had thought to be problematic. So I found a research p...

Energy Storage Systems Technology (ESS Tech Inc), the star child of flow battery industry, one of the few flow battery companies to ever go public, a technology with raw materials so cheap that you could buy them for pennies. This is the company I looked up to for 3 months, the ingenuity in their technology. Of course, a battery of iron is the way to go, its an economic masterstroke. Source But I was missing something, if it was so easy to build, why wasn't everyone doing this. All Iron redox flow battery should be easy, if any Indian or Chinese manufacturer knew about this technology, they would reverse engineer it in 1 year.  But I was wrong, not only because they hold a LOT of patents (103 granted, 214 filed), but also because physics doesn't give free lunch. So here are the roadblocks I ran headfirst into, while trying to copy ESS. 1. The Stack  As I mentioned in the last post , charging an Iron Redox Flow Battery is like electroplating, it requires slow charging, which me...

Iron and Vanadium based electrolytes can both be used Redox flow batteries, both use tanks, pumps and cell stack, but they don't operate the same way. While Vanadium Redox Flow Batteries stay completely liquid in their operation, All Iron Hybrid Batteries don't. And the name itself tells you why-  Hybrid. When you charge an All Iron battery, its positive side converts Fe2+ to Fe3+, and stays liquid, but the negative side converts Fe2+ to Fe0, or solid iron.  So why is solid iron a problem ? Well because - 1.The electrode that we have used i.e. graphitic carbon felt, is a conductive sponge, it is designed to absorb liquid and transfer electrical energy to it, it instantly clogs when solid iron is deposited on it. 2. Solid iron is not soft, nor does it grow evenly, it grows in the shape of needles or dendrites (if you have ever seen iron filings, that's solid iron). Iron dendrites 3. Deposition of solid iron is also called electroplating, and current density in electroplating...