A cash boost from the German government will allow a multi-agency joint R&D project to develop better and cheaper bi-polar plates for redox flow batteries.
The country’s Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) has provided €3.9 million funding for the “extruded plate” project,
The cross-sector project aims to reduce the unit manufacturing costs of the batteries by developing a process to build bipolar plates with surface areas in the m2 range.
The project involves thyssenkrupp, Centroplast and Eisenhuth along with the research institutes Energie-Forschungszentrum Niedersachsen (EFZN) and Zentrum für BrennstoffzellenTechnik (ZBT
Eisenhuth will transfer the research results. ZBT, supported by Eisenhuth, will select and develop materials suitable for the new production technology.
Plastics specialist Centroplast will scale up the bipolar plates and demonstrating the feasibility of manufacturing plates on a m2 scale using the new technology.
Thyssenkrupp Industrial Solutions will integrate the bipolar plates into redox flow batteries and optimise the cell design with a view to large-scale applications.
The joint project is being coordinated by Eisenhuth.
Thyssenkrupp expects to be able to market the technology from 2018.
The main focus will be on the manufacturing defect-free, high-quality bipolar plates.
