Harnessing A Multidisciplinary Approach to Accelerate High Energy Density Flow Battery Development and Commercialization

  • Kaur, Aman Preet (PI)
  • Odom, Susan (PI)
  • Odom, Susan (Former PI)
  • Landon, James (Former CoI)

Grants and Contracts Details

Description

Societal Need and the Customer: The United States, and the world, needs low cost and flexible stationary energy storage. This energy is needed both to overcome unexpected power outages and because renewables such as solar and wind are increasingly adopted, their intermittency necessitates other power supplies to keep the grid balanced. Batteries can provide this power and relative to other options are among the best with regards to fast startup time and geographic flexibility. The battery that is under consideration for this proposal is best suited to larger stationary installations, making the customer residential or industrial operations in need of responsive and CO2-free stationary power to handle utilities which have a number of business cases for electrochemical energy storage and power outages. The Value Proposition: The value proposition is to make utilities money by providing a fast responding power source which can mitigate some of the costs associated with designing the grid for peak load. The Innovation: The innovation of this technology is that it is an extremely high energy density flow battery. Rather than storing energy using dissolved redox couples as is done with conventional flow batteries the energy is stored in solid electroactive materials, which increases the volumetric energy density by up to an order of magnitude. This innovation in energy density enables installation of flow batteries, which have inherent modularity and scalability advantages, into locations where footprints could otherwise be cost prohibitive (e.g., urban areas) The Partnership: The partnership for this project requires a multidisciplinary team and thus includes an organic redox shuttle chemist at University of Kentucky (UK), an expert at synthesis and characterization of ion conducting organic membranes at University of Virginia (UVA), an engineer specializing in solid electroactive battery materials at UVA, and an industry partner at United Technologies Research Center (UTRC) who is experienced in the system design, scale up, and commercialization of flow battery technology. Training and Leadership Development in Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Major contributors to this project will be graduate students at both UK and UVA. In addition to mentorship in pursuit of their Ph.D. and the gaining of deep technical knowledge in electrochemical materials and systems, they will receive training to put them on the path to succeed as leaders in entrepreneurship and their technical profession. The NSF INTERN program will be leveraged to provide industry experience for the students, and the students will participate in entrepreneurial training via UVA’s I-Corps site
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date5/1/206/30/22

Funding

  • University of Virginia: $143,253.00

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