A 3D-printed battery that could help tackle the global climate crisis by helping to store renewable energy that would otherwise be lost has been devised by researchers in Belfast.
The battery that Queen’s University has developed is based on iron, which is much easier to source than the typically-relied-upon lithium. It can also be produced for about £75 (€88).
Lithium-ion batteries, the same technology found in mobile phones, laptops and increasingly in cars, are effective at a small scale but are less suitable for longer-duration, grid-scale energy storage, said Josh Bailey.
They are also more expensive to scale up than flow batteries and come with a greater fire hazard as they have more flammable components.
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The two researchers’ work could make flow batteries a “potential game changer” for large-scale renewable energy storage. A flow battery stores energy in liquids rather than solid electrodes as lithium-ion batteries do.
Bailey and Hugh O’Connor from the university’s school of chemistry and chemical engineering said the development could help make a “big impact on the road to net zero”.
Net zero refers to a state where the greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, going into the atmosphere, produced by human activity, are balanced by the amount being actively removed from the atmosphere.
“The biggest challenge with renewable energy is simple – we cannot control when the sun shines or when the wind blows. The uncomfortable reality is that clean energy still only makes up a small share of our overall energy use, around just 16 per cent in both the UK and Ireland,” said O’Connor.
Bailey told The Irish Times that the type of battery developed could be used for wind farms, solar farms and potentially in uninterrupted power supplies, adding that any flow battery is usually used for “large-scale, long-duration energy storage”.
He said in Northern Ireland there is a particular issue of wind turbines being turned off as the “grid can’t support that electricity being generated at those sites, the demand is not there for it or the network just can’t support it”.
He said the flow battery can act as a buffer to store the excess electricity instead of losing it.
“In principle this is both an economic and an environmental potential improvement by basically having more buffers at a wind farm or indeed a solar farm.”
There is also interest in using this type of battery as “some form of uninterrupted power supply”, he said.
The energy could be deployed from a charged-up flow battery if the connection at any critical infrastructure goes down, there is a power outage or a safety concern.
The researchers’ 3D-printed battery hopes to address the issue of fossil fuels dominating how power systems run.
“We have tried to tackle that by making a super-cheap cell by 3D printing some of the parts,” Bailey said.
“We’re super excited because we think we can have a really important impact on anyone that’s looking at flow batteries.”
O’Connor realised how expensive it was to buy a flow battery cell during his PhD research so he decided to start 3D printing them, cutting costs from anything up to £3,000 (€3,527) to about £75.
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Bailey said 3D printing allowed them to come up with different shapes and designs that could be printed within a day with rapid prototyping “and you’ve got a new system you haven’t had to fork out all that money”.
He said cost is an important factor but more so that there is the ability to “test lots and lots of different designs very quickly, much more cheaply”.
Now, using the cell developed at Queen’s, scientists across the world are working to understand the major differences across laboratories by performing nominally identical tests, with the same cell and following well-defined protocols.
The Queen’s researchers have led a large, international research study in collaboration with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, bringing together over 35 research groups from across the globe, including teams at Harvard in the US and Cambridge in the UK.
“The work is helping to accelerate breakthroughs in long-duration energy storage, advance the transition away from fossil fuels and firmly position our team at Queen’s as leading the development of clean, reliable energy technologies,” Bailey said.
