Researchers at Queen’s University Belfast have built a 3D printed flow battery cell that costs around £75 to make, against the £2,000–£3,000 a commercial lab-grade equivalent typically runs, and are giving the design away for free to labs worldwide.
Dr Hugh O’Connor and Dr Josh Bailey, from the university’s School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, say the cell could accelerate research into large-scale, long-duration storage for intermittent renewable power, and, unusually for a lab tool, the point isn’t to sell it but to get every research group using the same hardware.
The project grew out of a practical problem. During his PhD, O’Connor found that buying a commercial flow battery test cell for his own experiments would cost thousands of pounds, so he began 3D printing his own instead. “As part of my PhD research, I realised how expensive it was to buy a flow battery cell, anything up to £3,000, so I started 3D printing them,” he said. “After a lot of trial and error, eventually these started to work really well and I was able to create one for around £75.”
An Ikea-style fix for a field-wide problem
What turned a cost-cutting workaround into a wider research tool was a second problem O’Connor ran into once he started comparing notes with other labs: nobody’s results matched. “When I compared the results to other research, I realised that standards are not the same across different laboratories and nobody was getting the same results because we were all using our flow batteries differently,” he said.
Rather than patent or sell the design, O’Connor and Bailey packaged the roughly ten-part kit, 3D printed flow pieces, membrane, gaskets, electrodes and current collectors, with a step-by-step build guide O’Connor calls “Ikea-style,” and sent identical cells to research partners.
More than 35 groups are now using it to run matched experiments under the same protocols, including teams at MIT, Harvard and Cambridge. “It’s been fantastic to see that we’re already making global impact,” said Bailey. “By distributing the Queen’s cell around the world, we have been able to lead a large, international research study.”
3D printing batteries, sustainably
Sustainability sits at the centre of Queen’s strategy, not on top of it. The team picked iron chemistry specifically to avoid the two materials that dog most competing battery technologies: cobalt, whose mining raises well-documented ethical and environmental concerns, and vanadium, which is scarce, geographically concentrated, and prone to volatile pricing. Iron is abundant and easy to source almost anywhere, which means the sustainability case doesn’t rest on a single clever material substitution, it’s built into the choice of chemistry from the outset, and it’s what makes an iron flow battery a genuinely viable, scalable option for storing wind and solar power rather than just a cheaper lab curiosity.
Other groups have approached sustainable battery-making from different angles, also using 3D printing as the enabling technology. Researchers at EMPA 3D printed a supercapacitor from a cellulose-and-glycerol substrate patterned with carbon and graphite ink, engineered specifically to be biodegradable and compostable once its working life is over, aimed at cutting the electronic-waste burden of the billions of low-power IoT and wearable devices now in circulation.
German firm Blackstone Technology, meanwhile, has taken 3D printing into series production of lithium-ion cells using a patented, water-based printing process the company says cuts waste material by half and energy use by a quarter compared with conventional cell manufacturing.
Different chemistries, different scales, same underlying bet: that 3D printing isn’t just a faster or cheaper way to build a battery, but a way to build a genuinely greener one. Queen’s contribution is proof that sustainability and accessibility can be the same design decision. That’s a small but real step toward batteries that are cleaner by construction.
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Featured image shows Dr Josh Bailey and Dr Hugh O’Connor are the scientists behind the research. Photo via Queen’s University Belfast.
