Symposium EN09-Materials and Systems for Grid Energy Storage—Redox Flow Batteries

Redox flow batteries are a promising technology for grid-scale energy storage due to their potential to improve grid stability and efficiency, and also to facilitate reliable integration of intermittent renewable energies. The development of performance-competitive, stable, cost-effective battery materials and systems is essentially important to advance this technology towards practical applications. Recently, significant progress has been made in the development of high energy density electrolytes, stable organic and polymeric redox couples, electrodes and catalysts, and membrane materials. However, challenges remain in the fundamental understandings of battery phenomena and processes, including experimental and computational approaches for elucidating solvation structures, electrolyte/electrode interfaces, failure/degradation mechanisms, and transport. These are critically important to achieve technical breakthroughs that will enable ubiquitous implementation of this technology. Moreover, high-level developmental needs have been identified for system-level optimizations of the state-of-the-art flow batteries, such as stack prototype, flow field, safety diagnostics, cost analysis, and field analytics. In addition, recent electrochemical systems integrating redox flow battery and other clean energy technologies (solar cell, hydrogen production, biomass conversion) have opened a promising new avenue to harvest the advantages of both technologies. This symposium will encourage the discussion of new concepts and challenges at the cutting-edge through both fundamental and applied studies of materials and systems for redox flow batteries. It will also bring together a diverse mix of leading researchers and emerging talent in this exciting field of energy storage.

Topics will include:

Aqueous and nonaqueous redox flow batteries
New battery chemistries
Organic and polymeric electroactive materials
Clean energy (solar, biomass, H2, etc) integrated flow chemistries
Ion exchange membranes and porous separators
Electrodes and electro-catalysts
Failure/degradation mechanisms
Transport of heat, mass, and charge
Battery safety
Computer modeling
Stack prototyping
Cost analysis

Invited Speakers:

Song Jin (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA)
Thomas A. Zawodzinski (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
Tianbiao Leo Liu (Utah State University, USA)
Y. Shirley Meng (University of California, San Diego, USA)
Michael J. Aziz (Harvard University, USA)
Noel Buckley (University of Limerick, Ireland)
Yet-Ming Chiang (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
Jaephil Cho (Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, Republic of Korea)
Xiangkun Ma (Dalian Rongke Power Co. Ltd, China)
Shelley Minteer (University of Utah, USA)
Jens Noack (Fraunhofer Institute for Chemical Technology, Germany)
Susan Odom (University of Kentucky, USA)
Levi Thompson (University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, USA)
Qing Wang (The Pennsylvania State University, USA)
Jingyu Xi (Tsinghua Univesity, China)
Z. Gary Yang (UniEnergy Technologies, Inc., USA)
Huamin Zhang (Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, China)
Lu Zhang (Argonne National Laboratory, USA)