liquid flow cell batteries

That's several year's old and apparently did not work which wasted a lot of tax payer money.

Quote:Under the terms of a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the company must have a fully-functioning prototype battery system by late 2013

So it never happen!!!
More wasted money. YOUR MONEY

Some of the old lead battery UPS's that needed long run times used a somewhat similar setup. They would size the batteries for the max amount amps they would need and them size the tank for the amount of run time they would need. Once generators got more popular for back up UPS's down sized and they switched battery technology with the shorter run times off UPS's.

I have seem far too many technology's that work great in the lab and then fall flat when scaled up to real world applications.

I remember a collegue who works for an oil firm, confident that as long as battery technology doesn't advance, oil and coal are America's present and future. However, should batteries get within an order of magnitude of energy density by volume of gasoline, he will be up at night.

Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, promises. Maybe after wasting several thousands of hours and forty thousand plus kWh chasing the elusive pulse charge desulfation ghost has left me a bit hesitant to be prematurely optimistic.

My goal now is to win a gigantic lottery, buy a huge ship, modify it to dispense iron filings into the south pacific ocean, encouraging a biblical grade viral growth of algae which will suck 3% of the CO out of the atmosphere and plunge us into another ice age. The hilarious part is that it would work 100% guaranteed.

I gave up reading about battery advancements. Other than tweaks to chemistry (look at all the Lithium-centric battery options now), there hasn't been anything new in batteries in a long time. Not sure if it's "Big Oil" killing these new technologies, or the scientists inventing them are exposed to too many fumes in the lab and are having pipe dreams.

Still waiting for the bacteria, soy, corn, carbon nanotube, graphene, pixie dust based cell that was supposed to revolutionize electric vehicles more than a decade ago.

Amazing stuff. Who knows what kind of energy density can be stored?

I'd doubt very much that the liquids are totally safe. One thing about batteries is that you need elements that are reactive in nature. In the case of this liquid battery (as I understand it) the lithium is suspended in the fluid and nano devices charge the fluids to a potential, one an anode and the other a cathode. That may make one corrosive and the other acidic. It also may be that the fluids, when spilled to a ground, cause all the nano guys to stop and the fluid totally loses any potential or charge. If the last is true, I would be warning out of my a*^.