Data-Driven Electrode Parameter Identification for Vanadium Redox Flow Batteries Through Experimental and Numerical Methods

03 July 2020, Version 4
This content is a preprint and has not undergone peer review at the time of posting.

Abstract

The vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) is a promising energy storage technology for stationary applications (e.g., renewables integration) that offers a pathway to cost-effectiveness through independent scaling of power and energy as well as longevity. Many current research efforts are focused on improving battery performance through electrode modifications, but high-throughput, laboratory-scale testing can be time- and material-intensive. Advances in multiphysics-based numerical modeling and data-driven parameter identification afford a computational platform to expand the design space by rapidly screening a diverse array of electrode configurations. Herein, a 3D VRFB model is first developed and validated against experimental results. Subsequently, a new 2D model is composed, yielding a computationally-light simulation framework, which is used to span bounded values of the electrode thickness, porosity, volumetric area, fiber diameter, and kinetic rate constant across six cell polarization voltages. This generates a dataset of 7350 electrode property combinations for each cell voltage, which is used to evaluate the effect of these structural properties on the pressure drop and current density. These structure-performance relationships are further quantified using Kendall $\tau$ rank correlation coefficients to highlight the dependence of cell performance on bulk electrode morphology and to identify improved property sets. This statistical framework may serve as a general guideline for parameter identification for more advanced electrode designs and redox flow battery (RFB) stacks.

Keywords

Vanadium redox flow batteries (VRFBs)
Interdigitated flow field (IDFF)
Electrode parametric study
Data-driven modeling
Numerical modeling
Experimental validation

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