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Vanadium redox battery

type of rechargeable flow battery

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJul 13, 2026
Entity authorityQ905330 ↗
Source-derived summary

The vanadium redox battery (VRB), also known as the vanadium flow battery (VFB) or vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB), is a type of rechargeable flow battery which employs vanadium ions as charge carriers. The battery uses vanadium's ability to exist in a solution in four different oxidation states to make a battery with a single electroactive element instead of two.

For several reasons, including their relative bulkiness, vanadium batteries are typically used for grid energy storage, i.e., attached to power plants/electrical grids.

Numerous companies and organizations are involved in funding and developing vanadium redox batteries.

History

Pissoort mentioned the possibility of VRFBs in the 1930s. NASA researchers and Pellegri and Spaziante followed suit in the 1970s, but neither was successful. Maria Skyllas-Kazacos presented the first successful demonstration of an All-Vanadium Redox Flow Battery employing dissolved vanadium in a solution of sulfuric acid in the 1980s. Her design used sulfuric acid electrolytes, and was patented by the University of New South Wales in Australia in 1986.

One of the important breakthroughs achieved by Skyllas-Kazacos and coworkers was the development of a number of processes to produce vanadium electrolytes of over 1.5 M concentration using the lower cost, but insoluble vanadium pentoxide as starting material. These processes involved chemical and electrochemical dissolution and were patented by the University of NSW in 1989.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Vanadium redox battery” as type of rechargeable flow battery. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1986, 1989—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where Vanadium, redox and battery can be independently traced.
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Why this record matters

The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as type of rechargeable flow battery. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q905330. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1986 and 1989.

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This entry incorporates text from “Vanadium redox battery” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.