An ‘ecosystem’ of six global companies have joined forces to launch and commercialise what they are calling groundbreaking storage technology with a vanadium flow storage system.
Engineers and researchers at United Technologies Corp (UTC), working in partnership with Vionx, have created a grid-scale battery to compete with other redox battery technologies in terms of run time and cycle life.
The UTC breakthrough involves a process within the cell called an “interdigitated flow field”, where the most efficient flow-through and flow-by processes are integrated to generate a higher power density at lower pressure.
The power cell has a patent pending in-site rejuvenation process that recovers a 3% performance loss every few thousand cycles for the life of the system.
UTC’s X-FLOWTM technology can scale power and energy capacity independently so that run time can be increased by adding more fluids and power by adding more battery stacks.
The flow batteries, the partners claim, last for ten hours and can make 10,000 cycles with minimal degradation and no limits on depth of discharge.
Vionx Energy has already delivered a large-scale vanadium flow storage system to the US Army at Fort Devens, Massachusetts.
The group of six includes Starwood Energy Group, Siemens, 3M, VantagePoint Capital Partners and Jabil to license, finance, manufacture and deploy the energy storage system.
