People involved in the video:
Name: Jiří Vrána
Position: Co-founder PFES
Organization: Pinflow energy storage, s.r.o.
Short interview for the video:
What is the main contribution/role of your institution in the HIGREEW project?
Pinflow energy storage, s.r.o. mainly contribute to the scale-up of the battery from the laboratory scale to the industrial scale. This scale-up involved the design and testing of the battery stack. The battery stack needs to be optimized in terms of good electrochemical performance, homogenous flow distribution, low pressure drop, low shunt currents, safe and leakless design and easy assembling procedure.
What is the most challenging and/or exciting part?
The most challenging part of our research was about how to deal with two different electrolytes. In vanadium redox flow batteries positive and negative electrolytes have similar properties, so the design of the positive and negative half-cell might be the same. In case of organic electrolytes, positive and negative electrolytes might have significantly different properties in terms of density, viscosity, conductivity, or reaction kinetic, and thus battery design should be optimized for each half-cell separately.
How are the results relevant to you and how will you make use of the project results in your institution? How are these advances important in the field of energy storage?
Thanks to the HIGREEW project we had the opportunity to develop the design of a new redox flow battery based on organic electrolyte. The design of the battery stack for organic electrolytes is slightly different from the design of the vanadium redox flow batteries, which are currently the main product, so we have gained a lot of experience about designing the battery stack for different chemistries which will help us in our future work, and our future work will help to the transformation of the energetical sector as we will be able to offer safe, sustainable, efficient and cheap storage solutions. We had also the opportunity to focus on monitoring of homogeneity of stack active materials.
What is your experience within the HIGREEW project and collaborating with a team of EU partners?
The work within the HIGREEW project consortium was a great experience for us. We have built strong new relations with other researchers in the field of redox flow batteries across Europe and we believe that on the basis of this new relations we will be able to efficiently collaborate in the future and together help with the energetical transformation of Europe.
More videos from the HIGREEW partners can be found on the video timeline.