(459d) Establishing Design Criteria for Cost-Effective Aqueous and Nonaqueous Redox Flow Batteries

Electrochemical energy storage has emerged as a critical technology to enable sustainable electricity generation by alleviating intermittency from renewable sources, reducing transmission congestion, enhancing grid resiliency, and decoupling generation from demand. Redox flow batteries (RFBs) are rechargeable electrochemical devices that store energy via the reduction and oxidation of soluble active species, which are housed in external tanks and pumped to a power-generating reactor. As compared to enclosed batteries, RFBs offer an attractive alternative due to decoupled power and energy, long service life, and simple manufacturing, but further cost reductions are needed for ubiquitous adoption.

Recent research has primarily focused on the discovery and development of new redox chemistries. Of particular interest are low cost organic molecules and / or nonaqueous electrolytes with wide electrochemical windows, since decreasing materials cost and increasing cell potential offer credible pathways to lowering battery price. Though exciting, most of these emerging concepts only consider new materials in isolation rather than as part of a battery system. Understanding the critical relationships between material properties and overall battery price is key to enabling systematic improvements in RFBs. In this talk, I will discuss the use of techno-economic modeling as a guide for application-informed fundamental science for aqueous and nonaqueous RFBs with a focus on specifying property requirements for transformative new materials and devices, elucidating key technical hurdles, and, hopefully, motivating new research avenues for the chemical engineering community.