Vanadium Redox Flow Batteries: Asymptotics and Numerics

Modern demands for increasingly efficient renewable energy delivery have generated substantial interest in vanadium redox flow batteries (VRFBs) as an energy storage technology, with mathematical modelling and numerical simulation playing an increasingly important role in their development. Although the overwhelming majority of work in this area tends to involve time-demanding computation, this contribution summarizes our own recent activities in deriving asymptotically reduced versions of the multi-dimensional transient models that are normally used to describe the operation of a VRFB. We find that our models are able to predict the charge-discharge curve and the state of charge of the VRFB as accurately as two-dimensional transient models, but typically at around 1/250th of the computational cost.