At the end of November 2021, the autumn school of the “Nordic Flow Battery Network” took place in Turku, Finland. It was hosted by the University of Turku under the leadership of the EU-funded COMPBAT project. Similar to SONAR, COMPBAT is concerned with the development of a high-throughput screening process to search for new organic active materials for redox flow batteries.
Over the three-day event, a variety of speakers reported on different topics in the research and development of redox flow batteries. PhD students were given the opportunity to present posters on their work, give talks or exchange information. The last day of the autumn school was entirely organised by the PhD students in Turku. The speakers were from a mixture of academic and commercial backgrounds, so that application-related content was also presented beside basic research.
Among the invited speakers were Prof. Dr. Piotr de Silva from the Technical University of Denmark and Prof. Dr. Jens Noack from Fraunhofer ICT, who are both involved in SONAR. Piotr gave a talk on DFT calculations (DFT – density functional theory) in general and specifically in relation to flow batteries. Jens gave a short overview of the development of flow batteries over the last 15 years at Fraunhofer ICT.
