CENELEST

Daniel and Jens from CENELEST attended this year’s 241st spring meeting of the Electrochemical Society in Vancouver, Canada. Together with Prof. Dr. Piotr de Silva from the SONAR project, they gave two keynote lectures, three additional lectures and chaired two sessions in the area of redox flow batteries and computational electrochemistry.

SMART Energy is one of the largest renewable energy events in Australia. As at the last event in 2020, CENELEST participated again with a booth at the fair. The content of the exhibition was the presentation of the possibilities of CENELEST as well as showing the results of some projects and cooperations.
Among other things, a technology demonstrator for the High-Throughout screening process, which is being developed in the international SONAR project, was represented. The software for the search for new active materials for aqueous organic redox flow batteries could be tested on a laptop. In addition, materials of cells, electrodes and a small demonstration redox flow battery were shown. The booth was supervised especially with the support of UNSW students from UNSW Challeng program NextGEN.

After almost two years, it was possible to travel to Australia again in March 2022. During the same period, work at UNSW was limited. For this reason, mainly inventory work took place in preparation for future projects, as well as preparation for participation in Smart Energy 2022 in Sydney. If all goes well, the work in CENELEST will intensify significantly again in the course of the year. Furthermore, the exchange of staff will hopefully also increase significantly again.

At the end of November 2021, the autumn school of the “Nordic Flow Battery Network” took place in Turku, Finland. It was hosted by the University of Turku under the leadership of the EU-funded COMPBAT project. Similar to SONAR, COMPBAT is concerned with the development of a high-throughput screening process to search for new organic active materials for redox flow batteries.

Over the three-day event, a variety of speakers reported on different topics in the research and development of redox flow batteries. PhD students were given the opportunity to present posters on their work, give talks or exchange information. The last day of the autumn school was entirely organised by the PhD students in Turku. The speakers were from a mixture of academic and commercial backgrounds, so that application-related content was also presented beside basic research.

Among the invited speakers were Prof. Dr. Piotr de Silva from the Technical University of Denmark and Prof. Dr. Jens Noack from Fraunhofer ICT, who are both involved in SONAR. Piotr gave a talk on DFT calculations (DFT – density functional theory) in general and specifically in relation to flow batteries. Jens gave a short overview of the development of flow batteries over the last 15 years at Fraunhofer ICT.