You taught last year, we haven't seen the taught last year, go watch it on the Yaka tomorrow.
Thank you for being here.
Thank you.
Hello everyone.
Our names are Kirk.
And I'm Daniel Fernandez, Kirk Smith.
And we are going to give this talk about scaling up open source batteries.
So we created an organization called the Flow Battery Research Collective,
which our objective is to create the first set of open source batteries for small and large scale.
So this is us, this is like one of the first,
we're doing one of the first demonstrations of our kids in our university in the Netherlands.
So why do we want to do open source energy storage?
There are no open source energy storage solutions that we know of.
So if you go and look for an open source battery, you won't find anything available.
You want it to like create your own battery from raw materials.
You would have to figure out from like all the patents and the textbooks on everything,
how to make it up yourself.
There is no set of instructions of how to do this.
This task is not trivial.
Battery technologies are complicated,
and having no blueprint means that you need to spend a lot of time and work doing it,
which many people have tried through the years,
but if we just have a cohesive open source strategy,
then we can be much more effective.
And yeah, well basically there is currently no clear path to create rechargeable energy storage from raw materials.
We don't have that.
And the open source alternative would improve,
you know, our energy independence and it will also enhance industrial development,
because now we cannot develop the same thing 20 times.
As it has happened in batteries many, many times,
our company starts creating some type of battery and they fail.
And they spent 20 years and have 2000 patents and now all that's gone.
So we should only do it once.
And this will also increase energy storage access in developing countries,
because now they can start from scratch even if they only have the raw materials.
Our goals with this, we want to open source licensing,
so we want to create the technology blueprint that anybody can use.
And we don't want to sell this technology at all.
We want everybody to be able to use it.
And we hope to be able to, you know,
maybe make some money from selling parts that we manufacture while still
allowing anybody who wants to manufacture them to also do that and improve them.
We want to do medium and large scale storage because that's where the usefulness of this is.
And we want to do this with low material costs.
We don't want to do like an open source lithium ion battery that requires
and nitrin atmosphere manufacturing.
I'm very complex manufacturing procedures.
We want to do low material costs so that anybody can reasonably build their own battery.
We also want this to be a highly reliable process.
We don't want this to be a battery that you build and then the next person
which tries to build it has huge problems building it.
We want this to be very highly reliable.
And of course, we want high material availability.
We don't want to focus on materials that are very hard to source,
or in very specific regions of the world.
We want materials that anybody anywhere could reasonably source.
And an important part of this is we want there to be openly available characterization of this
so that you can build your battery and then there's a set of tests that you can run
to make sure that you build it properly and that it is doing what it's supposed to do.
And this is also in line with open source characterization software and hardware.
So not only the battery is important, but how are you going to test it?
How are you going to figure out that it's charging on this charging at the proper capacity?
It's as the proper lifetimes, et cetera.
And this is the first thing that we built, which is we started working on a technology called a flow battery,
which is a technology that is considered ideal for large scales.
In a traditional battery, your energy storage is restricted to the materials you have inside the battery.
In this case, the energy storage is externalized to liquids such that you can decouple the power
density of the battery from the capacity of the battery so that we can have a lot of capacity without having like a huge cell.
And this is a small, you know, table top battery.
And the idea of this is obviously not to store energy.
The pumps consume way more energy than the battery generates.
But the idea is that in academia, there is no such.
There is still not a standardized small scale setup that is open source and low cost that includes everything that you need in the setup.
Imagine that it's safe to touch.
We are going to pass our battery kit and that safe to touch it hasn't touched any chemicals yet.
But it's so that you can see it has that thing has everything the battery needs,
which most of the open source kits or the open source approaches to flow batteries don't have.
It has the pumps, it has the pump controls, it has the reservoirs, it has all these tiny little things.
Because when we started building a battery, we realized, hey, it's not only like this thing in the middle,
which is the cell, it's like the tubing, the reservoirs, everything like that tubing,
to cause like 30 tries of different tubings to find because it turns out that energy that instincts like to react with other things.
And this is tested.
I mean, we tested this at our homes, so it's been interesting.
So the first chemistry we tested and the idea of this small bench top cell is to help us characterize chemistry.
Some figure out what we can do reproducerly.
We started testing this zinc iodine chemistry, which we can do quite stable cycling,
and we can get good energy performance.
We can basically reproduce a lot of the things that we see in the scientific literature surrounding these batteries.
And zinc iodide is a very reversible, very nice chemistry for the most part,
except when it forms solid iodide and it's sort of a...
It doesn't really explode, but you know, like the two in consplash and things like, if you're not careful.
So it took a bunch of work to figure this out and to get stable charge these charge curves on efficiencies.
But the cost of the zinc iodide materials is quite large, you know, it's $80 per kilowatt hour,
which doesn't sound like too bad, but this is only for chemicals.
It doesn't account for any of the hard work that you're seeing, it's just the chemical species.
Because iodide turns out, it's not as available as we think.
It is in the sea, so it is there, but it's very dilute.
And then it is basically produced in very specific regions in the world.
There, you doesn't produce any at all that I know of.
Definitely not an industrial scale.
So if you use the technology like this, you would suddenly become dependent on these material.
So we tried other things that are more easily accessible.
So iron is widely available in the world.
Iron is widely available in the EU, so it would be very easy to get iron in the EU minds a lot of iron.
And we can do iron-based chemistry, which basically we use iron in both sides of the battery.
And in one side, we oxidize the iron in the other one.
We reduce it, and we're basically doing a battery that's based sort of on rust.
We are oxidizing every using iron, and we are able to get charge storage.
This is a complicated chemistry, and we are just starting it, and we've had some pretty good results.
But the price is quite low.
The price is now $30 per kilowatt hour for the materials.
But if you look at the energy density, the capacity here, it is like 14 on the zincio right here.
Although we have been able to get this significantly higher, but then for this iron, it's like four is like all we've been able to get in a stable way.
And there's challenges.
But now that we have this small kit, anybody can do it, you know?
You can. You can.
Or you could either build a kit yourself from three different parts, machine parts.
You can go to our website at VRC.gov and look at the materials build it yourself.
And then you can test things and see what happens.
And we have a forum.
And just be safe.
And then we said, okay, let's do the next step.
Let's try to scale this up because this thing here is just like two square centimeters of area, very small.
Now we want to do way more, you know?
Because we want to store some real power, so let's make this bigger.
So we did this larger cell.
And we used wood for the end plate material.
Turns out it's much cheaper than metal.
And so this was our first try at a at a large scale cell.
We like that it had like this a steam punk key look.
It's very.
And basically the idea of this cell is that you don't only have like a single cell like in the beginning,
but this is actually a stack.
So we have multiple cells that are stuck together because they voltage of these reactions.
They voltage that you get from these batteries is low.
You get like 1.2 0.9 volts and then you need to stack them in series to get meaningful voltages.
So our idea is to build these stacks so that we can get our goal is to get a stack that we can get 12 volts at or 24.
So that we can couple these with like the, you know, solar technologies and things like that.
Now, we then also wanted to look at static technologies.
Not only like your your flow battery technologies, but also see hey, can we do anything on the static side,
that because there is also no open source static sites.
Although these these static batteries have been studied for 200 years.
There's no like open source let us it battery or anything like that.
So we started looking and we found these copper manganese chemistry that has been developed.
And we said, well, this sounds pretty interesting. Let's test it out.
There's patents for these several.
So it was like, okay, how we can check, how can we change this so that it's not infringing on these patents and then we found these instead of using sulfuric acid.
We decided to test a chemistry with methane sulfuric acid, which is a similar acid, but it's not the same acid.
So it's not covered by their IP allegedly.
I believe it's my personal opinion.
No lawyer here.
And it's a, we tested this with carbon felt and graphola electrodes and this is basically just copper and manganese and we do these reaction in acid that you have here at the bottom.
And the BC is very simple. You just have a carbon material, a solution and then the electrodes to extract it.
And we actually get pretty good energy densities that are comparable with those of lead acid batteries.
And pretty much similar to the results that you find in the scientific literature for the sulfuric acid site of these batteries.
And the good thing about these batteries is that they electrolytes such low cost.
It's only 18 to 16 dollars per kilowatt hour.
So this is like really cheap and it's like, hey, well, maybe I could like build this in my backyard, like, don't.
But you, it's like, yeah, maybe this is we can do this.
And then we started looking, hey, what, what if we wanted to be like a bigish thing, you know, what would that look like?
Well, it turns out that the devil is in the details surprisingly.
So while the chemicals are very cheap, the materials are really not contrary to a flow battery in a flow battery.
We have these big tanks and then the areas that we where we are extracting charge are quite like small.
But here in an normal battery, we need, we need like bigger electrodes.
And it turns out that the carbon felt material, which is like the material where we deposit and we extract things from.
And it's actually very expensive.
It's like, if we did this, it would be, it doesn't show.
And it's super flushed.
Yeah, no.
No, okay.
Yeah, so it's actually $310 per kilowatt hour when you take into account, like, how expensive all these materials are.
And the fact that you have like, this, this was with like all materials we could buy.
But turns out that bulk metal, like if we have big metal plates and graphite plates, these are expensive as well.
You can see all of these costs is just like things that go in there that are not playing into the energy at all.
They are just they're current collecting and the conductive materials.
So we think for comparison, at least in my own phosphate battery is $60 to $80 per kilowatt hour.
Like those things are really, really cheap.
But I bet you cannot build one of those at home.
And then, so we say, what can we use a material that is less expensive?
You know, so we started looking for what's the cheapest conductive material you can get and it turns out there's something called calcine petroleum coke.
And that's like, that's like they give it away.
That's like an industrial waste product almost.
And then we can't, we think we can make paste with this and if we like do some little bit of magic with the way we call a current.
We think we can get this down to $55 per kilowatt hour and dreaming right now if we can do this like we think we should be able to.
But it's one of our next steps is to actually build one of these static batteries using these sort of process with these materials and see if we can, you know, figure it out.
So what's our plan?
Right now.
We want to continue test and validate the large sale that you see there and we want to create the 12 volt stack and give people a blueprint of like, hey, you can build an open source stack.
Stacks, there's no open source stacks. There's a bunch of like small scale sales that you can build for like our lab scale sale.
There's a few open source projects for that.
No open source projects on stacks because industry normally finances academics and when people get to the stack level industry says, no, no, no, the stack is not open source.
The stack is for us.
And then they all go bankrupt and then the stack is for no one.
So stacks have been developed many times independently, many times in industry.
So we are just going to do it once.
And then we want to produce stable charging discharge curves with the large flow sale.
The large flow sale has been challenging because it turns out that if you have something large making it not leak is harder.
So there's been we've had some some challenges with the entire design and we have been made a lot of progress and we are about to start doing cycling testing with our large scale sale.
And we hope we can get stable charging discharge curves because we want to give you guys something figuratively that you can just use and reproduce, you know, and get some results.
And then we would want to do a one kilo watt hour stacked flow battery because that is like useful energy.
You know, once you get to the kilo watt hour scale, it's like it's it's working, you know, it's no longer like a toy.
It's no longer like an academic exercise.
So we want to get there with the sinchiodine chemistry, which is the one we have the most trust on.
And then we want to continue validating these iron chemistry that I showed you are at a small scale.
Because it's not ready for the big scale at all.
We want to continue testing.
But now that we have this small kid, hopefully we can have our community testing our kid, our small skills kid has already been reproduced at least three times that we know of independently.
Like not by us at all, which means that the design is a, you know, manufacturer by independent people.
And then we want to do a test as small scale petrol in coke copper manganese battery.
And see if we can create a blueprint so that people can manufacture those electrodes and manufacture those batteries.
That battery is special interesting because it is, if we are able to build those materials correctly,
would be a faster and easier route to larger energy storage.
Especially in developing countries, this materials are very easy to get.
So it would be great.
And then a medium scale copper manganese battery would be our next test, our next step, which would be in like the 32 100 watt hour range.
Would would be, which would be something, you know, like probably around a leader in size or a little bit more.
And well, the great thing about this small scale kid is that we can now test a bunch of different chemistries that come out and try to see if the patterns that come out have any holes that we can just like squeeze into a get like open source technology server.
Hopefully nobody will sue us.
So, unless we want to acknowledge, you know, the people who have made this possible.
And especially, you know, an el net has supported us financially and has made a lot of what you see possible.
They funded the creation of our small scale kid and our large scale flow battery.
And hopefully we will continue to work with them in the long term.
And well, thank you very much for all your attention.
And if you want to visit us, you can go to abrc.dev and see our project.
We have six minutes for questions.
Okay.
Hi, nice to meet you.
What worries me a bit is cycling.
So you missed it like five or ten cycles.
Can you get more hungry for food?
Okay.
So you ask about the cycle ability of the battery, whether we can get to higher cycles on 10.
The answer is yes, we can.
I don't know if we can get to 10 years of cycling.
I just, so the longest cycle of the battery has been something like three weeks,
which has been something like a hundred cycles with our single income industry, which worked well.
But I, the problem is that I don't have the time to do the cycle for so long,
because our battery areas are not small enough and our volumes tiny enough to cycle like very quickly.
So the cycling times are longer.
But they, they functionality of a battery is not only measuring the number of times you can cycle it back and forth,
but also on the amount of time you're cycling.
You know, it's not the same to cycle a tiny battery a hundred times in like an hour versus cycling a bigger battery.
Fewer times, but like a much longer time.
But yeah, I mean, I don't know.
I haven't, I haven't cycleed it for, you know, normally we would expect a battery that can do 10 years to be
cycleed thousands of times.
So it should be possible.
Like what?
But I don't know, maybe some of you would want to test, you know, long-term cycling.
Any other questions?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
So you were asking about Peter Allen's project?
Yeah, I'm, I've seen that.
Yeah, he's seen, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's an iron-based battery and he's seen he's in Idaho actually.
As far as I remember.
Yeah.
So in static batteries, there is his project, which I think is polished three versions now.
So I stand corrected.
There is one.
Peter Allen's project.
Yeah, so yeah, there's, yeah, there's, there's say the Peter Allen is a great point.
He is done the effort to make a battery that is reproducible and that is like validated.
So yeah, a lot of credit to him.
And then the efforts on YouTube that you see on sync bromine batteries and all that.
While the sync bromine chemistry is there and it is a reasonable battery, it is a reasonable battery chemistry.
It is also a really dangerous battery chemistry and not a really great battery.
It has a lot of levels in the details.
Especially bromine is extremely aggressive chemically.
It will lead to everything.
Like, even the carbon materials like the graph I felt and the graphic, the bromine will destroy them with time.
And bromine is a dangerous chemical substance that you want to have like a 50 gallon barrel that is full of elemental bromine at your house.
Like, that you build yourself.
Yeah, sure.
But then will your neighbors want to have a 50 gallon barrel of bromine?
Like, it is possible, but I think there is nobody has put up plans to say, okay, this is a sync bromine battery.
Build it this way.
These are the expected cycling results.
This is, so yeah, you could build one, but you cannot build like a standard one from open source.
But yeah, great point I would put around. Thanks for reminding me.
I have a lot of questions.
We'll try to put some open out.
My first one is, are you working with open source to touch your staff and what are you using to cycle?
And you touch a little bit on characterization.
What are you using to characterize the batteries right now and like you understand how they fail?
That sort of thing.
Yeah, so you ask about how we, we're using any open source potential stats and how we are characterizing them basically.
So we are currently using the my stat open source potential stat, which is a great potential stat.
And we use that for the cycling of the small scale battery.
For the large scale, it's not, it doesn't have a high enough current rating.
But we use it for all our small scale tests.
The software, we don't use the my stat software or the original software.
We have heavily modified it to, to allow us to control pumps, to allow us to do a lot of flow battery tests.
We have also done using the my stat open source potential stat.
We have also done other characterization tests like cyclic bolt time entries and things like that outside to characterize the chemistries.
Oh, yeah, yeah, we have done plating stripping experiments and things like that.
But I'm, I'm not, like, we really don't have the ability to do like as deep of a characterization as you would do in like industry or academy.
Because we kind of do things like microscopy or material analysis or things like that that would be really useful.
You can do that.
That's the idea.
I mean, that's the idea.
Like with when you have this open source, I initially, if the idea is that we don't do like, it's only, if it's only the two of us, we will get nowhere.
It should be like all of us.
And then we can't get somewhere, you know, much better.
And like I have, if you do it, if you build the battery and you say, hey, your battery is, this design is not good.
I have this better, the assignment will, will take it.
I mean, we have no attachment to the battery.
Yeah.
Okay.
Thank you.