..
So I know what you’re all thinking.
It’s
“Whoa there, hold your horses.
…Like, who’s this Vanadis ?”
And …..
VANADIS:
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There she is.
And now you say “
oh I know … She’s that old NORSE goddess.. It’s Freya isn’t it, wife of Oden!!”
And you don’t ask why she’s in a chariot pulled by cats, and why doesn’t she have dreadlocks and a fierce expression and a few psilocybin mushrooms hanging off the cart.
The BBC informs us (as of 2014) [
link]
..”Vanadium was actually discovered twice, and one of the discoverers was the Swedish chemist Nils Sefstrom, who named it after the Norse goddess of beauty, Vanadis," says the Italian chemist, Prof Andrea Sella of University College London.
To explain why, Sella produces a flask of an easily misidentified yellow-coloured liquid.
It is, he says, a solution of "oxidised" vanadium in sulphuric acid - that is, vanadium that has been stripped of all five of its outermost electrons (it inhabits column five of the periodic table).
He then adds a shiny lump of a zinc-mercury amalgam and begins to shake the concoction violently.
"The zinc is going to allow us to put electrons back onto the vanadium - the chemical process we call 'reduction'," he explains.
The solution quickly turns green, and then gradually becomes blue. "And if we keep shaking for another few minutes, we will eventually end up with a violet colour."
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Each change of colour represents one further electron being passed on to the vanadium.
"The ease with which you can hand electrons to the vanadium and take them away - this is the basis of a very, very stable battery."
Vanadium "redox flow" batteries are indeed stable. They can be discharged and recharged 20,000 times without much loss of performance, and are thought to last decades (they have not been around long enough for this to have been demonstrated in practice).
They can also be enormous, and - in large part thanks to their vanadium content - expensive. The smallest of the "Cellcube" batteries that American Vanadium is producing in partnership with German engineering firm Gildemeister has a footprint the size of a parking bay and costs $100,000…”
Well that was back in 2014, and whilst Vanadis has added 10 years, and is possibly
more ponderous (or is she an eternal 23?) the batteries are improving in sleek, streamlined ability all the time ( despite that vanadium batteries didn’t take off from 2014 because of being so ungainly and expensive, and because lithium pushed its’ foot in the energy storage door first, with large batteries (BESSes I think they are called) that have also been improving all the time.
But still they do only last about four hours, storage-wise… and they catch fire and lithium isn’t why you’re here, is it?
(20min delay)