Hi,
Here's a link to a paper on a flow battery with non toxic water soluble reactants, apparently 10 times cheaper to manufacture than lithium batteries. I guess to make it even simpler they could remove the separation membrane as I had read about one laminar flow battery experiment did this.
cheers, Jamie
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The interesting question is then, what plant produces the relevant quinone in high yields, and where does it grow?
Synthesising a quinone from CO2 without the help of a plant might just be a little too expensive to be economically attractive. I didn't sit through a ll those lectures on "natural products" in organic chemistry for nothing - it might have been fifty years ago, but the message stuck.
"Total synthesis" was a way of proving a structure, not an economically fea sible route to mass production.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
If the reactants are preserved through a charge/discharge cycle then a moderately high manufacturing cost may not be that bad.
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I did not see anywhere in the research paper a value for the possible energy density. But I suspect it might be pretty low. How many litres of chemicals to store the several Gj you might need for a big plant, capable of running for a few days when the sun doesnt shine ?
Existing tech using molten salts works, but the sizes get enormous for more than a few hours storage.
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That's what you've got a grid for - the sun is usually shining somewhere du ring the day.
Energy density is unlikely to be impressive. Quinones aren't usually wildly water-soluble, and they tend to be big molecules and don't store energy in particularly high energy bonds.
Burning hydrocarbons to water and CO2 does release a lot of energy per gram of hydrocarbon - nobody counts the mass of the oxygen that comes free from the atmosphere.
The nice thing about an enormous tank of molten salt is that it has a high mass to surface area ratio, so having a thermal time constant of week or so doesn't require you to spend a lot on insulation. You are storing heat, r ather than electric power, but at least you don't have to convert it into e lectric power before you can store it.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
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