New Entrepreneurial Fellowship - Protoqin

The Faraday Institution is pleased to announce it has awarded another Entrepreneurial Fellowship.

The Entrepreneurial Fellowship programme supports researchers across the UK looking to create new businesses and commercialise battery technologies. Fellowships receive mentoring, strategic business advice and introductions to key industry contacts.

Introducing the new Fellowship:

Protoqin: Water-based energy storage

Protoqin team. From left to right: Zhongkai Li, June Mercer-Chalmers, Frank Marken.

Researchers at the University of Bath have developed an innovation to allow both hydrogen and oxygen gases to be captured and stored within water, without any gas evolution. This is achieved using “triphasic” materials such as polymers of intrinsic microporosity, which have been shown in laboratory experiments to soak up both hydrogen and oxygen when dispersed in water. As a result both oxygen and hydrogen are stored (separately in anode and in cathode compartments), forming the basis of an energy storage device. In contrast to lithium ions crossing a membrane and being stored in the electrodes of a lithium-ion battery, here, hydrogen ions cross a membrane and the resulting gases are stored.

A water-based battery technology could have multiple benefits (low cost, high safety, high sustainability) and could potentially deliver competitive energy densities.

The researchers have submitted a patent on their innovation, and are in the early stages of spin-out from the University. The entrepreneurial fellowship will mainly be used to support staff costs as researchers build a small scale prototype device that would open a pathway into commercialisation. Initial performance testing will be carried out on the proof-of-principle device and the team will present the concept at conferences, trade shows, and stakeholder meetings to explore the areas where the proton battery concept could have maximum impact, before developing a business plan.

Posted on November 14, 2024