Modeling and Analysis of All-Vanadium Redox Static Cells

Progress made in renewable energy technologies (e.g. solar, wind and tidal energy) has fueled the research in energy storage technologies which are indispensible for the success of these intermittent sources of energy. Electro-chemical energy storage systems specially redox flow batteries (RFB) offer modular and scalable energy storage systems for large scale energy storage¹.

Research in different RFBs has been pursued to improve the efficiency, cost and safety aspects of these systems. While research on most aspects requires small scale (lab-scale) redox flow battery, research on some aspects can be performed and analyzed using a static cell set up (e.g. cross contamination, characterization of membrane and electrolyte etc.).

These static cells (H cell) can be used to quickly estimate the performance of redox flow batteries (at least at the lab scale) including capacity loss due to cross contaminations². Use of static cell with simplified modeling approach (including capacity loss) to validate experimental data is demonstrated by Tang et. al.² on vanadium redox flow battery. This approach can be made more robust and general to be useful for any redox couple by combining electrochemical models and robust optimization framework (parameter and state estimation techniques) to increase the confidence in predictions made by static cell.

This presentation will focus on electrochemical models for static cell with parameters and state estimation framework to increase the fidelity of results obtained by experiments performed.

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge financial support from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency- Energy (ARPA-E), and the Solar Energy Research Institute in India and the United States (SERIIUS), as well as, Washington University in St. Louis’ McDonnell Academy Global Energy and Environmental Partnership (MAGEEP) and SunEdison Grant.

References

1.              B. R. Chalamala, T. Soundappan, G. R. Fisher, M. R. Anstey, V. V. Viswanathan and M. L. Perry, Proceedings of the IEEE, 102, 976 (2014).

2.              A. Tang, J. Bao and M. Skyllas-Kazacos, J. Power Sources, 196, 10737 (2011).