'Roger, in Bangkok' has sent me a most enlightening paper on Vanadium Redox 
cells covering the work of Squirrel Technologies in Thailand. He has kindly 
agreed to my making it available to others. It can be seen at

        www.others.servebeer.com/temp/vanadiumredoxcell.pdf

150 kB pdf. 27 pages.

As well as some quite different ways of addressing the basic battery 
problems (eg series electrolyte flow to give greatly reduced pumping power 
and more constant cell voltage with discharge state and more) there are some 
fascinating applications such as a DC DC converter that uses redox flow 
cells alone as the voltage conversion means (all cells in electrical series, 
charge input cells to "strengthen" electrolyte, discharge at output point 
which 'weakens' electrolyte), a DC AC converter which works similarly and 
thereby addresses the normal problems of using a bank of batteries to supply 
a tapped sine wave power generator (higher voltage cells are required to 
provided less energy so discharge rates are unequal) and a carbohydrate fuel 
cell / battery direct conversion system that he says has shown 40% 
efficiency in converting energy from sugar to electrical energy. A sugar 
"powered" battery is an interesting and exciting prospect. A useful idea is 
the use of specially designed redox cells to take raw Vanadium salts and 
convert them to requisite starter electrolytes thereby avoiding more 
traditional external chemical processing.

The somewhat sparse squirrel pages at www.vanadiumbattery.com refer to 
initial patents for this technology that predate the initial Australian work 
that I referred to.



            Russell
 
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