3D-Printed Electrodes Could Make Grid-Scale Renewable Energy Storage Cheaper

A team at the University of Waterloo has developed a 3D-printed electrode that could make large-scale renewable energy storage safer and cheaper. Led by chemical engineering professor Dr. Maxime van der Heijden, the researchers used nature-inspired geometries to redesign a key part of vanadium redox flow batteries.

Redox flow batteries store energy in liquid electrolytes held in external tanks. That makes them well-suited for grid storage, because capacity scales with tank size rather than with cell count. The water-based electrolytes are also far less flammable than the materials inside lithium-ion batteries.

The catch has always been efficiency. Getting the liquid to move through the battery fast enough for useful power output requires porous electrodes with very specific internal structures. Traditional manufacturing methods struggle to produce those structures consistently.

Why 3D printing fits

The Waterloo team used a digital light-processing 3D printer to build porous carbon electrodes with triply periodic minimal surface geometries. These are complex repeating shapes borrowed from natural structures like bone and coral. The researchers tested several designs and found that the diamond geometry increased performance by 52%.

After printing, the structures were heat-treated to turn them into conductive carbon electrodes. The result is a part that can be produced with far more precision than conventional methods allow.

Proof of concept

The team validated the electrodes in laboratory flow cell tests and inside a working vanadium redox flow battery. The 3D-printed designs survived real operating conditions. That matters: many promising lab results never make it into actual batteries because the materials degrade too quickly.

The study appears in the Journal of Energy Storage. Future work will focus on increasing surface area, speeding up manufacturing, and using advanced design tools to push the geometry even further.

What it means for renewables

Wind and solar power do not always generate electricity when the grid needs it. Better, cheaper flow batteries would help store excess generation for peak demand hours. If the Waterloo design can be scaled for commercial production, it could lower the cost of grid storage and accelerate the shift away from fossil-fuel backup plants.