IIT-M researchers make advances in developing alternatives to lithium-ion batteries

Researchers at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT-M) on Thursday claimed to have made significant advances in developing alternatives to the conventional lithium-ion and lead-acid batteries for industrial usage, as the country aims to achieve 40% of its total power generation from non-fossil fuel sources by 2030.

Researchers said the study into vanadium redox flow battery stack development opens up possibilities for the indigenous fabrication of flow battery stacks by Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) units for domestic and grid-level energy storage applications.

The project is supported by grants from the Ministry of Education and Department of Science and Technology (DST), and involved researchers from the Departments of Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Electrical Engineering, and the Central Electronics Centre of IIT-M.

The IIT Madras Researchers have already filed two patents and presented this in numerous national and international conferences besides publishing research papers in reputed peer-reviewed journals, the institute said in a statement.

Researchers said a redox flow battery is an electrochemical system like a normal lead-acid or lithium-ion battery and works based on redox electrochemical reactions occurring at the anode and the cathode.

“As a secondary battery, it can reverse these reactions so that it is able to do both charge and discharge reactions, thus converting electrical energy into chemical energy and vice versa,” the institute said.

Professor Sreenivas Jayanti, Department of Chemical Engineering, IIT-M said they have developed operating protocols and design criteria for flow battery stack of power rating up to 10 kW using the prototype of a practical size that can be directly employed in industrial-scale stacks for grid-level storage.

Elaborating on the technical aspects, Ravendra Gundlapalli, PhD Scholar, Department of Chemical Engineering, IIT-M, said, “Typical life of a solid-state battery is three to five years; vanadium flow batteries are commercially available with a warranty of 15 to 20 years. From a fire safety point of view, vanadium flow batteries are extremely safe as the electrolytes are not combustible and thermal runaway possibilities are practically nil.”

The researchers said there are important advantageous characteristics of flow batteries and that the number of times the electrolyte can be charged or discharged is also very high (>10000 cycles).