Solvos – A flow battery technology company

Solvos is the next chapter in the mission founded in 2023 by Dr. Daniel Fernandez Pinto (chemist focused on organic solar cells and open-source energy storage) and Dr. Kirk Smith (engineer with deep expertise in flow batteries). Having built the Flow Battery Research Collective (FBRC) to democratize battery research with openly shared designs and hardware, Daniel and Kirk now lead Solvos, continuing that same principle, driven work with a sharper focus.

At Solvos, we channel our interdisciplinary roots and open‑source DNA into two flagship products:

• The Flow Battery Kit for Academia: A modular, bench‑scale system that enables students, educators, and researchers to explore flow battery chemistries, materials, and configurations. It’s meant for rigorous experimentation, not to store practical amounts of energy, but to illuminate underlying performance metrics, from efficiencies to charge densities.
• The Mystat Potentiostat: An open‑source electrochemical measurement device designed by the Yates group in Rochester in 2021(see the original paper here), tailored for flow battery and energy‑storage applications. Built for accuracy, adaptability, and transparency, it supports reproducible science and collaborative innovation. We modified its software to support pump control and flow battery experiments and created a rugged 3D printed case with active cooling (all open source as well).

Our ethos is unapologetically transparent: we publish all designs, documentation, and development roadmaps under open licenses (CERN, OSHWA, CC BY‑SA) and welcome contributions, from tweaks to redesigns to entirely new chemistries. Wherever possible, we rely on easily sourced, off‑the‑shelf components to reduce costs, simplify replication, and eliminate unnecessary complexity.

In short: Solvos exists because conventional battery R&D is often walled off or hidden behind proprietary designs. We don’t think that’s defensible. Our founders have walked the talk, prototyping in their apartments, deploying kits at conferences, securing early community and institutional funding (like from NLnet), and iterating in the open. Solvos takes all that and delivers it as real tools your lab (or scrappy maker-space) can use right now.

If you’re serious about advancing flow battery science, or just want to see how open R&D can actually work, this is where we start. Have fun!