MHD of Large Scale Liquid Metal Batteries

Liquid metal batteries are candidates for large-scale energy storage in a national energy grid. The attraction of the liquid batteries lies in the fast kinetics at liquid metal-electrolyte interfaces, simple assembly and recycling, while the major difficulties to implementation are their sensitivity to liquid motion and operation at elevated temperatures. The concept of liquid metal battery bears a close similarity to aluminium electrolytic production cells. The two liquid layer magnetohydrodynamic effects can be projected to the three liquid layer self-segregated structure of the batteries. The trend for commercial electrolysis cells is to increase their size instead of operating a large number of parallel small ones. Our aim is to develop a numerical model for the three density-stratified electrically conductive liquid layers using 3D and shallow layer approximation accounting for specific magnetohydrodynamic effects during periods of battery charge/discharge. A possibility to reuse infrastructure of an old aluminium electrolysis potline for a large scale liquid batteries facility is discussed.