[November Thematic report] Energy Storage System (ESS)by Nadir Huseynov | 08-01-2023 04:32 |
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 Green technology is a promising economic engine, which can balance the industrial development and the protection of environment. The core of all the green technologies is energy because the energy demand increases continuously as time goes by. However, the increase of energy supply is difficult because existing nuclear power plants and thermal power plants have either high risk or cause environmental pollution. Therefore, new renewable energies have been sought to solve these problems. The typical renewable energy, solar power and wind power, may be a source of environmentally friendly energy without the emission of pollutants, but it has the limitation because of unstable output. In other words, the solar and wind power energies cannot ensure a stable constant output, and are difficult to construct collaboration network with the existing power. Therefore, there has been strong demand for an energy source such as fuel cells as well as an energy storage system (ESS), which can store the excess energy at non-peak time of power and supply power at the required peak time. In short, it is necessary to develop the energy sources and energy storage technologies to solve the energy shortage and pollution problems of the next generation. One of the most promising fuel cells is the proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) because it has highest power density with low operating temperature, which makes it suitable for portable applications. And one of the most promising ESS is the vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) because it has an infinite operating cycles with non-explosiveness. Although they have been considered as future energy conveniences, they have not been widely employed because their structures such as bipolar plates (BP), endplate (EP) or flow frames (FF) are made of either brittle graphite, weak polymers or ceramic coated stainless steel. To circumvent the weak characteristics and difficulty of manufacturing of these structures, the carbon composite BP and the hybrid composite EP composed of carbon and glass composites for the PEMFC and VRFB and the glass composite FF for the VRFB have been developed. In this review paper, the design methods for these structures with the appropriate processing techniques are explained in detail. Proton exchange membrane fuel cell The proton exchange membrane fuel cell or polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) is electrochemical energy converters that convert the chemical energy of fuels directly into DC electricity. Hydrogen and oxygen are used as fuels in proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells, where the chemical energy is converted directly into electricity as shown in Fig. PEM fuel cells produce water and electricity without any pollutant via this process. Recently, many countries are suffering from the electrical energy crisis, and the energy storage systems have become more important for efficient power management. Among various energy storage systems, the vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) can be the best solution as it has many advantages. Specifically, the VRFB has a long lifetime, scalability for the energy capacity.
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