BALIHT takes first steps to develop sustainable, organic batteries
The general assembly gathered the entire multidisciplinary BALIHT team, which consists of researchers, experts, industry leaders and SMEs from different European countries. The meeting aimed to assess recent achievements by the project partners, and confirmed that the development of upcoming project activities are well on track, paving the way for upcoming activities in support of the ultimate goal of the project, which is to develop a new organic redox flow battery (RFB) suitable to work at high temperatures. RFBs are usually designed to work at temperatures up to 40ºC. However, using the battery generates heat. Under certain circumstances a cooling system is required to avoid electrolyte degradation or battery malfunction; cooling requires energy which results in reduced efficiency. That is why the BALIHT battery will be developed to work at temperatures up to 80ºC. Without the need for a cooling system, this innovation allows the battery to be 20% more energy efficient than existing organic RFBs. BALIHT is a European research project coordinated by AIMPLAS which officially kicked off on 1 December 2019, and is funded by the Horizon 2020 programme under the call ‘Building a Low-Carbon, Climate Resilient Future: Next-Generation Batteries’ (H2020-LC-BAT-2019-2020). Over the course of the first months of the project, all partners have been working jointly to make the first steps required to lay the foundations for the remainder of the project duration. For example, partner Grupo Cobra gathered in-depth knowledge on regulatory and cultural barriers related to organic RFBs, while CMBlu Energy AG explored technical aspects related to the RFB which will be developed by our project, and studied possible candidates for electrolytes and requirements for the battery components. AliénorEU set up various communication tools for BALIHT and made a first data management plan, which will support the project in making its research data findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-usable. These accomplishments are laying the foundations for the development of a new type of organic RFB suitable to work at high temperatures. You can find out more on www.baliht.eu Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter (https://twitter.com/Baliht_EU) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/BALIHT) to discover more about BALIHT and its developments.
Keywords
energy storage, renewables, batteries