Dr Hugh O'Connor
speaker
16 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 21 Jul
Dr Hugh O'Connor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Two, three years.
I was really interested in looking at how I could change the shape of the flow battery cavities to make them perform better.
And I went to buy some commercially available flow cells and they were like 1,000 to 2,000 pounds.
And instead of modifying them, I was like, okay, I'll try and make my own.
So I started 3D printing them.
After a lot of trial and error, eventually these started to work really well.
Most people will have come across a lithium-ion battery that might be found in your phone or in your laptop or increasingly in cars.
But a flow battery is different.
It's not based on storing electricity in solids.
We discussed it and genuinely felt that it could make a big difference to the field if we gave this away, and it could really help our careers and our research here as well.
So we really feel like it can really benefit this technology, hopefully.
There's like 10 components that go together, but how you assemble them can be quite important.
So it was really important that we sent out an IKEA-style instruction manual to our participants, and I think they followed it quite well.
Flow battery research is not always reproducible.
It's fun to know that the things that we've made here are out there, and that we're all working together to improve standards in flow batteries.
If flow batteries are scaled up to the size that they are in other places in the world, like China, in principle, we could be storing a large quantity of our renewable electricity in flow batteries.
Showing 1–16 of 16