Enhancing alkaline water electrolysis through innovative approaches and parametric study

Abstract

The objective of this study is to examine how different parameters impact the effectiveness of alkaline water electrolysis (AWE) in producing hydrogen. Multiple experimental innovative approaches have been examined, namely, mechanically induced electrolyte flow, induction heating of electrodes, and pulsating voltage power mode. In addition, multiple parameters that have been experimentally investigated, including concentration of potassium hydroxide (KOH) solution, input current density, electrode spacing, electrode thickness, cell temperature, electrode coating material, and electrode morphology. The results obtained from these tests show significant improvements in AWE performance and efficiency. A better understanding of the behavior of AWE and the factors that influence its performance has been presented through a detailed discussion of the experimental results. The results have shown that reducing the gap size between electrodes improves AWE efficiency, however this relation is not monotonic and after a critical gap size the performance starts deteriorating. Furthermore, the localized induction heating has shown an improvement in the overall efficiency by approximately 8 % accompanied by a marginal increase in the global system temperature of around 4.2 °C.