The 8th international flow battery forum (IFBF) has been held in Manchester, U.K. from June 27 to 29 in 2017. More than 300 participants all over the world who are from flow battery R&D companies, materials suppliers, energy storage users and academic institutions attended this meeting.

Three keynote talks were presented in this meeting. Prof. Maria Skyllas-Kazacos who is from the University of New South Wales is the founder of vanadium flow battery. He introduced the increased requirement of energy storage capacity in Australia and the R&D of vanadium flow battery technology to date.

Professor ZHANG Huamin from Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) is the person who firstly industrialized vanadium flow battery technology. He introduced the recent progress on the fundamental research and industrial applications of flow battery by DICP/Rongke Power. His introductions of the capacity of 300MW/year of Rongke Equipment Company and the 200MW/800MWh vanadium flow battery power station attracted lots of attetions and were highly praised by the attendee.  

Professor Michael Aziz from Harvard University introduced the development and challenge of new types of aqueous organic and organic metal flow batteries.

The hot topics in this meeting are market environment, policy, business model and application popularity of energy storage.

This meeting is beneficial for the further understanding and communication of flow battery technology among the flow battery R&D companies, materials suppliers, energy storage users and academic institutions. It can accelerate the development of flow battery technology significantly. (Text and Image by YUE Meng and ZHENG Qiong)

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