I’ll post this here. Im not sure if is that revolutionary, but it does use sawdust cooked to carbon for the electrodes.
And then they talk about super capacitors… i didn’t read it to see if it was worth replicating.
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Here is a newer one we haven’t mentioned. SorbiForce is a ukranian company based in Arizona (if I got that right, however their investor relations lists delaware) they are making Carbon, water, salt batteries. (I have not looked at the chemistry or the design to see what they included.) They are claiming 6k cycles and potentially 30 year lifetime. They are also claiming a 96% roundtrip efficiency, but apparently you need to add water which make it feel suspicious. 1.8 cost reduction over lithium (according to them) I also don’t know what the charging rate is.
It is interesting if it works because I can’t think of anywhere I could find carbon, salt and water for a shtf scenario.
Apparently they might have overhyped some of this. If you read this reddit thread, they are saying they use carbon anode, carbon cathode, and a cellulose separator. And they say it can work with just water, or they use Zinc Bromide or ZnBr2 which is the firefighting material they state.
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Companies incorporate in Delaware to avoid taxes. The vast majority of large companies in the USA do this. So you are probably correct about Arizona being where the company actually is.
Sounds like some Ukrainians watched Robert Murray Smith videos and wanted to use some of the billions of US dollars flowing into Ukraine to get rich quickly in the battery industry. I don’t see anything here that he hasn’t experimented with on his YouTube channel.
Bromide batteries are actually a decent chemistry for long life. But far heavier than lithium and toxic waste for end of life disposal issues. Though that can probably be handled with recycling. From what little i know bromine batteries seem reasonable for stationary storage but our society doesn’t really value long term solutions. We want the magic bullet that works in high volume repeat customers like lithium in cars. We also want one solution for everything. Higher manufacturing volume more profits.
Where is the profits if your customers only buy once in a hundred years?
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New technics are ok. We need that . Governments all over the world want to electrify, so storage is getting more important every day. New things, nice, but only excellent when you can use it in real life.
Just another free saturday and finished another two batteries, LFP. Works top so far, talks to the inverter. Thanks Matt, you put me in the right direction how to organise the system.
Still experimental install. 15 kWh each makes 45 kWh. Another two to go. Starting to get somewhere. Only one coupled to the inverter at the moment.
Dan, bromide is a flow battery, right? Talked to a salesman years ago. He said they were happy to pick it up and recycle at the end of the lifetime.
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If you read the reddit post and believe what the OP posted. I think these are similar to paper batteries another a signapore company called Flint is working on. Flint is using different metals. Sorbiforce is claiming their addition is the arrangement of the paper. They applied for 5 patents, but they didn’t state they got any. They also could be licensing the rights from the other company to build the batteries in the US.
They appear to be aiming at the stationary storage market.
Robert murray-smith’s paper battery is very similar, except these guys are claiming it is rechargeable, and you can dispose of them in safely. I am not convinced their claims aren’t extremely exaggerated. They are looking for 5M in investor funding. I don’t think they are looking to tap into the Ukraine funding, I think they just want to become millionaires.
It is about the same price point $50/kw as other technologies like sodium are claiming they can get to. And I personally am not sure lithium won’t get down that low.
I was thinking these might be good SHTF diy batteries. I haven’t jumped deep enough into it to see if that was actually plausible or not.
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Robert Murphy Smith claimed his paper battery was rechargeable which is why he was trying to build a pack for a EV that he never finished IIRC. He was in talks for mass production but claimed he didn’t want the license process IIRC.
I think from all his stuff i studied if you could get the bromine that battery he showed was a great DIY battery. I think you could literally make them in glass jars like canning jars and build a decent battery. I started looking into that bit iirc the bromine was either too hard to get or too expensive on small scale conpared to LFP mass production.
My guess is that Sodium will become cheap enough to be the real safe mass production product for people but that it is maybe still 5 years out for the monopoly rights to end under international laws.
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Robert Murray Smith had bromine as a liquid battery much like lead acid batteries. It wasn’t a flow battery. IIRC it is a very old chemistry that GM used for an electric vehicle back in the 70s during the first energy crisis but i could be wrong on when they prototyped a bromine battery powered car.
There is one of his videos about a large scale zinc bromine battery including the patterns he based it on.
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Flow batteries generally use two different chemicals, one for each “side” of the cell.
Invariably there is some cross contamination of fluids and that reduces the storage and power capacity with time. A separate circuit is needed to repurify and separate the fluids, a process that takes energy and adds complexity. Bromide flow batteries suffer from this issue.
Flow batteries that use Vanadium Oxide solutions are unique because vanadium can serve as the fluid on both sides of the flow battery. No purification circuit is needed. Vanadium is expensive though. Overall flow batteries have potential, but still plenty of challenges to sort out.
I think LFP batteries are good enough and cheap enough already. It causes me to spend little time on flow batteries. About the only thing on my radar away from LFPs are sodium-ion batteries, like those from Natron. They are available to commercial buyers and soon to be available to retail buyers at prices similar to LFP. Sodium-ion has some advantages vs LFP, particularly for fixed location storage, but some downsides as well. The raw ingredients are more available so there is scope for the battery cost to drop well below that of lithium chemistries.
The cost and performance of batteries has come so far so fast. It is really stunning.
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Temperature is a big advantage of sodium. For the rest? Dont know.
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It is 225g/mole for zinc bromide. or his 1.5l of 2.5 molar solution has 843g in it.
These guys have it for $10/kg.
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Zinc-Bromide-Znbr2-zinc-bromide-for_1600724738257.html
Then what SorbiForce is doing is using a paper separator instead of the ceramic one that Murray-Smith is using. And they are using electrically conductive carbon for the anode and cathode. and even in the video, Smith was saying, you can get all fancy with the design of the separator, and I think that is what SorbiForce is saying they did, and that is their technology. Not the zinc bromide, as it works with other chemistries as well. They said, they could just use water, and they probably could use iron. The zinc bromide just had better performance. However, it reacts fairly slow.
Now the OTHER company, Flint, is using like NMC battery chemicals for their paper battery. And I don’t see why you could use Iron redox, or iron with salt, but the round-trip efficiency is only 75-80%. Zinc Bromide is in that range too.
TBH You MIGHT be able to save some money… but with the lower energy efficiency, LiFeP batteries probably come out on top. IF SHTF, you may need to use something else. 
You can look at it as a stationary ‘flow battery’ without the pumps to move the liquids. Most have a separator material. The last one I looked at was like 200 dollars for a sq meter of the material. Then they use like a peristatic pump to get the correct flow of the liquids, and those tend to be expensive.
So a paper filter and lack of pumps significantly reduces the cost. And you might get vanadium to work with it, but that is more expensive then bromine but I think the energy density is higher, and i think it reacts faster. However i believe it is toxic so getting rid of it will be a pain.
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