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Concept
Vanadium redox battery
Summary
The vanadium redox battery (VRB), also known as the vanadium flow battery (VFB) or vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB), is a type of rechargeable flow battery. It employs vanadium ions as charge carriers. The battery uses vanadium's ability to exist in a solution in four different oxidation states to make a battery with a single electroactive element instead of two. For several reasons, including their relative bulkiness, vanadium batteries are typically used for grid energy storage, i.e., attached to power plants/electrical grids.
Numerous companies and organizations are involved in funding and developing vanadium redox batteries.
Pissoort mentioned the possibility of VRFBs in the 1930s. NASA researchers and Pellegri and Spaziante followed suit in the 1970s, but neither was successful. Maria Skyllas-Kazacos presented the first successful demonstration of an All-Vanadium Redox Flow Battery employing dissolved vanadium in a solution of sulfuric acid in the 1980s. Her design used sulfuric acid electrolytes, and was patented by the University of New South Wales in Australia in 1986.
One of the important breakthroughs achieved by Skyllas-Kazacos and coworkers was the development of a number of processes to produce vanadium electrolytes of over 1.5 M concentration using the lower cost, but insoluble vanadium pentoxide as starting material. These processes involved chemical and electrochemical dissolution and were patented by the University of NSW in 1989. During the 1990s the UNSW group conducted extensive research on membrane selection, graphite felt activation, conducting plastic bipolar electrode fabrication, electrolyte characterisation and optimisation as well as modelling and simulation. Several 1-5 kW VFB prototype batteries were assembled and field tested in a Solar House in Thailand and in an electric golf cart at UNSW.
The UNSW All-Vanadium Redox Flow Battery patents and technology were licensed to Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation and Kashima-Kita Electric Power Corporation in the mid-1990s and subsequently acquired by Sumitomo Electric Industries where extensive field testing was conducted in a wide range of applications in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
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