Fuel cells and flow batteries - a comparative process and design analysis

摘要

One key issue of future energy supply is the increase of efficiency of energy utilization and energy conversion under the condition that the importance of electricity will further increase. Thus electrochemical flow processes as fuel cells and flow batteries are going to become key technologies in this innovation process. The increasing amount of fluctuating renewable electric power generation needs the installation of electric storage. Hydrogen economy might be one solution because classic secondary batteries as batch processes have limits regarding the storage of larger amounts of electric work. The development of flow batteries changed the process of classic design of electrochemical batch process for storing electricity to a flow process like a fuel cell. For further development and a future research strategy it is important to understand in how far similarities and synergies to fuel cells can be identified, and if flow batteries are even another branch of the on-going fuel cell development.