Study on the operational characteristics of the vanadium redox flow battery

Abstract

The Vanadium Redox Flow Battery (VRFB) holds significant promise in the storage of energy systems with great capabilities and potential with the applications in an array of concepts. The vanadium battery technology holds the answer for the future’s search for clean and renewable source of energy.

The development of vanadium redox battery has been an interesting field to study in which the technology of this battery has been successfully utilized in energy storage systems. Currently, there are extensive experiments and research that are being conducted to improve the battery's performance and energy density in relevance with energy storage.

In vanadium redox battery system, liquid electrolytes store all the energies and always re-circulate back into the battery's system. Furthermore, these electrolytes can be charged as many times as possible. The transfer of electrolytes and ions across the membrane during the charge and discharge cycles explains the operation of this battery.

The State of Charge (SOC) of a battery is not a easy parameter to evalutate as it very complex and the value of the SOC cannot be determined directly from the battery. Thus, there are several methods that can be used to measure and evalute this parameter. It is necessary to accurately measure the SOC value because it affects the charging and discharging process.

The VRB has very attractive characteristics such as high efficiency, long lifetime, low operational cost, fast response and have the privilege of having independent energy and power capacity. This report investigates the characteristics and performances such as the transients modeling, State of Charge (SOC), charge and discharging cycles of the battery.