CENELEST

During March 14-16, 2022, the 18th Symposium on Modeling and Experimental Validation of Electrochemical Energy Technologies (ModVal) was held in Schloss Hohenkammer, Germany. Among the participants and as speakers were Dr. Roman Schärer from the University of Applied Sciences Zurich and AA/Prof. Dr. Jens Noack (Fraunhofer ICT / University New South Wales), project coordinator of SONAR. Roman was present with a poster on the results obtained in SONAR in the field of 0D modeling of redox flow batteries and Jens gave an overview talk on the results obtained so far in SONAR.

SONAR is an international collaborative project of several outstanding research institutes and universities to develop a model-based tool to find new organic active materials for future redox flow batteries. The University of New South Wales and CENELEST are partner in SONAR. https://www.sonar-redox.eu

ModVal is one of the most important conferences on modeling and simulation of electrochemical devices. This year’s conference was held with over 200 attendees from all over the world despite the severe constraints of the COVID pandemic.

Daniel and Jens from CENELEST attended this year’s 241st spring meeting of the Electrochemical Society in Vancouver, Canada. Together with Prof. Dr. Piotr de Silva from the SONAR project, they gave two keynote lectures, three additional lectures and chaired two sessions in the area of redox flow batteries and computational electrochemistry.

SMART Energy is one of the largest renewable energy events in Australia. As at the last event in 2020, CENELEST participated again with a booth at the fair. The content of the exhibition was the presentation of the possibilities of CENELEST as well as showing the results of some projects and cooperations.
Among other things, a technology demonstrator for the High-Throughout screening process, which is being developed in the international SONAR project, was represented. The software for the search for new active materials for aqueous organic redox flow batteries could be tested on a laptop. In addition, materials of cells, electrodes and a small demonstration redox flow battery were shown. The booth was supervised especially with the support of UNSW students from UNSW Challeng program NextGEN.

After almost two years, it was possible to travel to Australia again in March 2022. During the same period, work at UNSW was limited. For this reason, mainly inventory work took place in preparation for future projects, as well as preparation for participation in Smart Energy 2022 in Sydney. If all goes well, the work in CENELEST will intensify significantly again in the course of the year. Furthermore, the exchange of staff will hopefully also increase significantly again.