A Numerical Study on the Flow Characteristics and Flow Uniformity of Vanadium Redox Flow Battery Flow Frame

As the demand for electrical energy increases worldwide, the amounts of harmful gases in the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuel, are continuously increasing. As a result, the interest in renewable energy resources has been growing. However, renewable energies have fluctuating output characteristics according to local conditions such as the natural environment and geographical characteristics, which is a major factor deteriorating output quality. Recently, energy storage systems (ESSs) have been actively studied as a solution to this problem. A redox flow battery (RFB) is a system in which an active material dissolved in an electrolyte is oxidized/reduced to charge/discharge. A RFB mainly consists of an electrolyte tank, which determines the capacity, and a cell stack, which determines the output. As these components can be independently controlled, a RFB provides the advantages of a large capacity and a long lifespan. In this study, a new flow channel was designed to maximize the reaction area and reduce the pump loss to improve RFB performance. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and visualization experiments were used to analyze the internal flow characteristics of vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB). Additionally, we used the variability range coefficient and maximum velocity deviation to check if the flow discharged to the electrode was uniform. In the conventional flow frame, the flow discharged to the electrode has a non-uniformity distribution in the left and right, due to the S-shaped path of the inlet channel. In addition, it was confirmed that the outlet area into the electrode was reduced to 50%, resulting in a high pressure drop. To address this problem, we proposed a design that simplified the flow channel, which significantly improved flow uniformity parameters. The maximum velocity deviations for the existing and new flow channels were 11.89% and 54.16%, respectively. In addition, in the entire flow frame for the new flow channel, the pressure drop decreased by 44% as compared with the existing flow channel.