kirksmith

5 ms·

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Show HN: We're building an open-source battery [video](youtube.com)
8 points by kirksmith 4mo ago|0 comments
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by kirksmith 2y ago
The pumping cost constitutes a 1-2% total penalty on round-trip energy efficiency for a well-designed flow battery.
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by kirksmith 2y ago
I take your criticism, but as for your comment that it's "a student project at best"... we do have PhDs (mine in flow batteries !) and manage this project in our spare time, at our homes... Our small team is fully qualified
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by kirksmith 2y ago
Hey, thank you! The liquids are reusable, and are charged and discharged repeatedly without needing to replace the fluids. In other words the system is closed with respect to mass, only electrical energy (and minor amounts of thermal) are t
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by kirksmith 2y ago
*typo: meant to say we have a grant from NLnet https://fbrc.dev/posts/NLnet-funding/ , which will cover a few months of full-time work (for one contributor)
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by kirksmith 2y ago
Bingo, this is exactly the plan. Of course there are non-trivial engineering challenges when scaling up, but that's the rough idea.
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by kirksmith 2y ago
Iron plating is a hydrogen evolution nightmare. It's interesting for sure, but not feasible for a simple demonstration system, due to pH issues and oxidation state drift from hydrogen evolution. We do plan to explore it in the future,
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by kirksmith 2y ago
I agree... part of that frustration is why we're working on this project! See my short post on "Why you can't buy a flow battery today" https://dualpower.supply/posts/motivation-OSHW-RFB/
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by kirksmith 2y ago
Yeah I am self-hosting with a VPN and following all the best practices I know (not my expertise), not surprised there's some warnings going around.
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by kirksmith 2y ago
It's in the graph image, CE: 88.7%
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by kirksmith 2y ago
We are planning other electrolytes beyond zinc-iodine (including iron salts), but this one happens to be practical for getting started due to widespread availability, tolerance to oxygen (avoiding requirements of purging with inert gas), an
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by kirksmith 2y ago
Thanks! This kit is for R&D and educational purposes only, because of the use of positive displacement pumps (peristaltic, diaphragm, etc) instead of centrifugal pumps, it will never be able to effectively work as a battery since the pu
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by kirksmith 2y ago
some context: https://dualpower.supply/posts/motivation-OSHW-RFB/
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by kirksmith 2y ago
Wow, hi all, I am Kirk, the author of this blogpost, never thought my small ARM board home server would handle this much traffic! Currently reading through these posts, feel free to ask questions. Great to see interest. FYI, I am quitting m