That arrangement addresses the two major challenges with flow batteries. First, vanadium doesn’t degrade. “If you put 100 grams of vanadium into your battery and you come back in 100 years, you should be able to recover 100 grams of that vanadium—as long as the battery doesn’t have some sort of a physical leak,” says Brushett.
A flow battery contains two substances that undergo electrochemical reactions in which electrons are transferred from one to the other. When the battery is being charged, the transfer of electrons forces the two substances into a state that’s “less energetically favorable” as it stores extra energy.
Flow batteries have the potential for long lifetimes and low costs in part due to their unusual design. In the everyday batteries used in phones and electric vehicles, the materials that store the electric charge are solid coatings on the electrodes.
And because there can be hours and even days with no wind, for example, some energy storage devices must be able to store a large amount of electricity for a long time.
Now, MIT researchers have demonstrated a modeling framework that can help. Their work focuses on the flow battery, an electrochemical cell that looks promising for the job—except for one problem: Current flow batteries rely on vanadium, an energy-storage material that’s expensive and not always readily available.
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