A Generalized Reduced Fluid Dynamic Model for Flow Fields and Electrodes
in Redox Flow Batteries
Abstract
High dimensional models typically require a large computational overhead
for multiphysics applications, which hamper their use for broad-sweeping
domain interrogation. Herein, we develop a modeling framework to capture
the through-plane fluid dynamic response of electrodes and flow fields
in a redox flow cell, generating a computationally inexpensive
two-dimensional (2D) model. We leverage a depth averaging approach that
also accounts for variations in out-of-plane fluid motion and departures
from Darcy’s law that arise from averaging across three-dimensions (3D).
Our Resulting depth-averaged 2D model successfully predict the fluid
dynamic response of arbitrary in-plane flow field geometries, with
discrepancies of < 5% for both maximum velocity and pressure
drop. This corresponds to reduced computational expense, as compared to
3D representations (< 1% of duration and 10% of RAM usage),
providing a platform to screen and optimize a diverse set of cell
geometries.