Assessment of the reliability of vanadium redox flow batteries

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Received: 6 April 2020

Revised: 9 July 2020

Accepted: 9 July 2020

DOI: 10.1002/eng2.12254

S H O RT C O M M U N I C AT I O N

Assessment of the reliability of vanadium-redox flow batteries Florian Reichelt1

Karsten Müller1,2,3

1 Institute of Separation Science and Technology, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Erlangen, Germany 2

Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Helmholtz Institute Erlangen-Nürnberg for Renewable Energy (IEK-11), Erlangen, Germany 3

Institute of Technical Thermodynamics, Universität Rostock, Rostock, Germany

Abstract Redox flow batteries are an interesting energy storage technology because they allow separate scaling of power and capacity. For their utilization on large scale, it is crucial to ensure reliable operation. Failure modes of elements of the system have been evaluated, both, regarding failure rate and severity of the different failures. As the main failure mode directly linked to a specific component of the redox flow technology, degradation of the membrane due to oxidation by vanadium ions has been identified. However, it is demonstrated that reliability is not solely determined by the specific electrochemistry of the technology.

Correspondence Karsten Müller, Institute of Separation Science and Technology, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Egerlandstr. 3, 91058 Erlangen, Germany. Email: karsten.mueller@fau.de

A huge share of the overall failure rate is due to mechanical components such as pumps, valves, and sealing. Based on the findings it can be recommended to design the systems with a certain redundancy regarding cells and pumps but avoid excessive redundancy. This is crucial not only because of high CAPEX of redundant systems, but also because of the increased complexity with more valves and connections required for integrating redundant units. KEYWORDS dependability, energy storage, failure rate, flow battery, risk management, VRFB

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I N T RO DU CT ION

Redox flow batteries (RFBs) are electrochemical flow systems that store energy in soluble redox couples and which typically permit to separate storage capacity and power output. The energy is stored in form of two liquid media containing a redox system. These liquids are pumped through a cell, where electrochemical conversion takes place. An interesting feature of RFBs is the independent scalability of capacity and power.1 Therefore, it is not necessary to have larger electrodes, if more energy has to be stored, as it would be the case for conventional batteries, where energy storage and conversion are not separated. This makes RFBs particularly interesting for large-scale storage applications in which large amounts of energy need to be stored, but the requirements regarding maximum power are moderate. The most important type of RFB is based on vanadium (the redox system V2+ /V3+ on the one side and V4+ /V5+ on the other side). Detailed descriptions of the RFB technology are reported in References 2,3. A detailed schematic can be found in Reference 4. The work was carried out while K.M. was at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2020 The Authors. Engineering Reports published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Engineering Reports. 2020;e12254. https://doi.org/10.1002/eng2.12254

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