Liquid batteries

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Discussion

andburg

Original Poster:

7,701 posts

176 months

Thursday 15th August
quotequote all
Seen an article and i could be very wrong in my interpretation

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/liquid-batterie...

read like they've found a way to store electricity in liquid hydrogen, is this the future? EVs using hydrogen as a battery rather than a fuel? a world where you go to a filling station and potentially swap out your depleted hydrogen for fully charged hydrogen rather than charging, where the hydrogen isn't consumed so doesn't need to be produced in the quantities required for use in a fuel cell or ICE

phil4

1,322 posts

245 months

Thursday 15th August
quotequote all
There's a fair few hurdles... cobaltocene as the name hints at requires cobalt, a think everyone is trying to get away from.

Then although you're not directly consuming the hydrogen, you will be. It's not great stuff to store, especially as a liquid. You'd need to keep it very very cold, you'd need a container like those used in Hydrogen fuel cell cars, which have a limited lifespan, and you'd need to deal with boil off if it ever gets warm, and embrittlement of any of the connectors.

So basically like a current Hydrogen Fuel cell with its downsides, just that it uses H2 at a slower rate.

This seems to be aimed more at grid storage, in which case many of those downsides may be acceptable due to industrial scale and it not being in a car/garage.

Nomme de Plum

6,163 posts

23 months

Thursday 15th August
quotequote all
andburg said:
Seen an article and i could be very wrong in my interpretation

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/liquid-batterie...

read like they've found a way to store electricity in liquid hydrogen, is this the future? EVs using hydrogen as a battery rather than a fuel? a world where you go to a filling station and potentially swap out your depleted hydrogen for fully charged hydrogen rather than charging, where the hydrogen isn't consumed so doesn't need to be produced in the quantities required for use in a fuel cell or ICE
No,

Completely unsuitable for EVs. This would be for mass energy storage much like the old Wet Cell batteries but with a different chemical basis. They will be large and heavy. I suspect at least 10 years away anyway to be a viable mass energy store.

kurokawa

628 posts

115 months

Thursday 15th August
quotequote all
with my limited understanding and brief read, it looks like they are trying to develop a way to store hydrogen to fuel a hydrogen fuel cell.

We stored Hydrogen under very high pressure (which take up lot of space) or in liquid form (which is more difficult than pressured gas vessel and LH2 would need a new fuel pump very often).

it seem the idea is to hydrogenate some organic compound and "dehydrogenate" when H2 gas is needed, it might help solved the issue of storing H2, but to dehydrogenate a LOHC would be another technical issue that have to transfer from small lab bench test scale to full production

GT9

7,556 posts

179 months

Sunday 18th August
quotequote all
Until there is more information about the efficiencies involved, I'm reserving judgement.
Waste heat is the indefatigable enemy when it comes to effective and sustainable large-scale decarbonisation.