Publication:

Hydrodynamic and energetic analysis of an electrolysis cell for hydrogen production using openfoam

Resumen en inglés

This study presents a hydrodynamic and energetic analysis of a parallel-plate electrolysis cell using the open-source Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software OpenFOAM. An Eulerian multiphase model was applied to simulate turbulent, gas-evolving flows coupled with electrochemical phenomena under potentiostatic and galvanostatic operation. The simulation results agreed within 4% of an experimentally measured polarization curve of a vertical parallel-plate electrolysis cell equipped with TiO2/IrO2 electrodes. Using the validated model, an analysis of the effect of the flowrate on the cell voltage and specific energy consumption at different current densities was carried out. A threefold reduction in the flowrate showed an average 1.3% increase in the cell voltage, attributed to the observed formation of a gas curtain near the electrodes, which was more prominent at higher current densities. Other hydrodynamic behavior like gas accumulation could be studied, observing that under the operating conditions, the electrolyte backflow through the gaps between the electrodes and the cell walls was not strong enough to carry the gas bubbles down the cell and back into the interelectrode gap.