Background Information

Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Networks are joint research and training projects funded by the European Union. Funding is provided for doctoral candidates from both inside and outside Europe to carry out individual project work in a European country other than their own. The training network “SPACER” is made up of 21 partners, coordinated by Fraunhofer ICT in Germany. The network will recruit a total of 17 doctoral candidates for project work lasting for 36 months.

SPACER aims to develop new architectures for porous electrodes to improve the power density and energy efficiency of redox flow batteries (RFB), enabling affordable and durable long-duration energy storage. The approach is to use hierarchical structures, i.e. complex material layers that can be optimized to specific battery chemistries and flow phenomena from the microscale up. The developed technologies will be validated in half-cells and full working batteries at industrial partners at TRL 6.

Our objectives:

• Multiscale modelling to better understand RFB behavior and identify optimal hierarchical shaped pore- and electrode-structure to encounter optimum electrolyte as well as electrical flow.
• Prototyping of the identified structures via stereolithographic, 3D printing and textile techniques like tufting, machine-based embroidery techniques or non-interlaced 3D pre-forming.
• Development of advanced imaging and characterization technologies (X-ray micro tomography, EPR imaging and spectroscopy) to evaluate performance of electrodes and to map electrolyte chemical composition in micrometer resolution, allowing validation of the model predictions.
• Validation and evaluation of the RFBs with optimized hierarchical electrodes. 

Job Description

The advertized subproject is fully funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie European training Network "SPACER". It will be carried out by one doctoral candidate at Fraunhofer ICT, (PhD supervision at University of Bayreuth in Germany) over a period of 36 months.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Chemical Technology ICT in Pfinztal near Karlsruhe is one of approx. 75 Fraunhofer institutes in Germany. Its department for Applied Electrochemistry covers research on batteries, fuel cells, electrolyser, sensors and flow batteries. The Redox Flow Battery Group has been working for over 15 years in the fields of electrochemical characterization of materials such as electrodes, membranes and electrolytes, cell and stack development, system characterization and development, novel and optimized electrolytes, manufacturing methods and industrial scaling. The investigations and developments range in size from atoms to the MW range for application in the grid.

The goal of this doctoral thesis is to apply various procedures such as electrochemical wet treatment, covalent bonding, targeted surface functionalization to modify the surface of carbon electrode materials. 

The recruited researcher will investigate the influence of treatment procedures on the surface and electrochemical properties of carbon electrodes. These modified electrode materials will be used for better understanding of vanadium electrode reactions, which provide a basis for vanadium flow battery chemistry and the possibility to reduce battery costs by optimization of the materials. The developed procedures for carbon surface modification will be upscaled to meso-scale to test modified materials in laboratory cells, i.e. battery prototypes.

Salary

The Doctoral Network “SPACER” is financed by the European Union under the framework of the program HORIZON Europe, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions. The doctoral candidate will be hired for 36 months under contract by Fraunhofer ICT, with a monthly gross salary of approx. 3900 € (including mobility allowance, but excluding other allowances that depend on eligibility, e.g. family allowance, special needs allowance).