Optimal combinations of AWE design and control strategies

Determine the optimal combination of porous electrode designs (including nickel woven mesh and open-cell nickel foam), flow field geometries, and operating control schemes that maximizes alkaline water electrolyzer performance for specific applications, addressing the currently unclear joint effects of these strategies.

Background

The paper reviews recent advances showing that individual strategies—optimizing porous electrodes, designing flow fields, and developing control schemes—can each improve alkaline water electrolyzer performance. Despite these separate successes, the authors emphasize that how to best combine these strategies for particular application contexts is not yet resolved.

Clarifying optimal combinations is important because two-phase mass transfer and bubble management strongly influence transport overpotential and overall productivity. A robust imaging and quantification approach, such as the presented SAM method, can provide data-driven guidance for selecting and integrating strategies.

References

To date, optimizing porous electrodes, flow field designs, and control schemes have been demonstrated for achieving outstanding AWE current densities beyond 1000 mA/cm at low cell voltages. However, the best combinations of these strategies realizing the optimal AWE performance for certain applications mostly remain unclear.

— Scanning Acoustic Microscopy for Quantifying Two-phase Transfer in Operando Alkaline Water Electrolyzer  (2405.10716 - Dou et al., 2024) in Section 1: Introduction