SONAR redox

In search of truly competitive solutions for storing energy from renewable resources, the SONAR-team sets out to develop a framework for the simulation-based screening of electroactive materials for organic redox flow batteries (RFBs) – in aqueous and non-aqueous solutions. This will help to reduce the cost and time-to-market and thus strengthen the competitiveness of the EU’s battery industry. - We follow a multiscale modelling paradigm, starting from the automated generation of candidate structures for the electroactive material and then iterate through molecular-, electrochemical interface-, porous electrodes-, cell-, stack-, system- and techno-economic-level models. - Finally, storage technologies are only comparable when using the levelized-cost-of-storage (LCOS) as a global metric, which accounts for all relevant effects across all the scales. - The simulation results go into a database for further processing – we will exploit advanced data integration, analysis and machine-learning techniques, drawing on the growing amount of data produced during the project in order to speed up the computations. - Selected models will be validated by measurements in RFB half-cells and lab-sized test cells to ensure our predictions' quality. We will work closely with industrial partners to ensure the commercial viability of the results. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement no. 875489.