A scientist at Queen’s University Belfast has developed a battery that could potentially reshape the renewable energy landscape. The 3-D printed flow battery is designed to combat a challenge that threatens the battery industry’s longevity: raw material scarcity.
While lithium-ion batteries, which use solid electrodes to store energy, flow batteries employ liquid electrodes that make them extremely durable and highly scalable. However, their scalability is hampered by the constrained supply of vanadium, a metallic element needed in flow battery construction.
Flow batteries could be critical to addressing renewable energy intermittency at a massive scale, but raw material scarcity makes them quite costly to build. The new 3-D printed battery tackles this scarcity issue by replacing vanadium with iron, a much more abundant and affordable alternative.
Using iron could reduce flow battery construction costs substantially and allow the U.S. and other territories to scale up green energy production and integration.
One of the researchers was incentivized to design a more affordable flow battery after he found that a battery he needed for his PhD cost between $2,680 and $4,020. Dr. Hugh O’Connor, a post-doctoral researcher at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), started 3-D printing prototypes and tweaking them to create more affordable cells.
Through various meetings, calls, and conferences with colleagues, Dr. O’Connor found that several other researchers had their own cheap working prototype cells. He has offered his design to the global research community to advance efforts in creating more affordable flow batteries.
At just $99, the new 10-compartment design is mind-bogglingly cheaper than what’s available on the market and could allow manufacturers to significantly scale up flow battery production. At the moment, flow battery production is hampered by difficulties accessing the earth’s vanadium reserves.
Vanadium is also more volatile than lithium, making many investors leery of investing in any major flow battery ventures. China and Scotland are some of the very few territories that have built large-scale flow batteries, with China recently commissioning the world’s largest flow battery facility and Scotland running a trial in 2024.
However, irregular research results coupled with raw material scarcity have kept flow battery production from advancing on the global stage.
QUB researcher Dr. Josh Bailey is part of a team conducting multi-institution studies involving the new 3-D design from Dr. O’Connor. According to the researcher, the team believes that the ongoing reproducibility studies could accelerate flow battery production and deployment, especially if battery manufacturers use the same standard.
Batteries will be key to achieving net-zero emission goals by 2050, the researcher says, and flow batteries may play a critical role in achieving this lifetime goal. As other energy storage solutions from companies like Turbo Energy S.A. (NASDAQ: TURB) proliferate, flow batteries could provide an additional alternative that addresses the different stationary battery energy storage needs of different markets.
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