A unit designed and assembled for home storage of electricty	Inside the unit: an inverter (left) and NiMH modules 12V-70A(right)

An affordable unit for home storage of electricity is a priority activity area for ENDAM. Considering that the daily consumption of electricity is around 6.52 kWh for a typical household in Ankara, a unit with a storage capacity in excess of of 8 kWh would be needed for this purpose. The unit shown above is designed and assembled within a fourth year course in the Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering, METU. The unit houses NiMH modules 12V-70A series connected in pairs providing 24V output, together with a suitable inverter. The unit could be programmed so that it would store energy during the night from 22:00 to 6:00 (when the cost is low) and it would supply electricity to the home for the rest of the day. The unit could also accept input (24V) from solar panels which, if installed with sufficient capacity, could fully charge the batteries creating a home independent of the city power.
Although the unit shown above were designed and assembled from cylindrical cells already available from the market, two teams have worked on how to manufacture modules best; one with prismatic and the other with bipolar architecture (*).

(*) Active materials for this design was supplied by BASF( Dr. Kwo Young) which is gratefully acknowledged.