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| Home > Publications database > De-risking and scaling strategies for PEM water electrolysis |
| Conference Presentation (Invited) | FZJ-2025-00543 |
2024
Abstract: Proton-exchange-membrane (PEM) water electrolysis is a crucial building block to tackle the challenges of future energy production. Besides the use of hydrogen as energy carrier, there is an emerging need for green hydrogen for various industrial processes e.g, in the steel industry and the chemical industry. Therefore, the German National Hydrogen Council (NWR) proposes a minimum demand in Germany for green Hydrogen of about 94 TWh in 2030 which in turn demands an electrolysis capacity of 39–52 GW1. This underlines the urgent need to increase electrolysis capacity in the future. Hydrogen generation by water electrolysis offers a variety of advantages as high current density, easy handling and maintenance and the possibility for a modular setup1. Besides all that, PEM-electrolysis is still in an early commercialization stage. Efficient De-Risking is a mandatory step to increase the speed in setting up electrolysis plants, which includes an understanding of ageing phenomena and degradation mechanisms. Nevertheless, a variety of degradation and ageing phenomena are reported for PEM electrolytic cells. But investigations on an industrially relevant scale are still hard to find and there is no reliable data available to investigate such phenomena.Here, we are focusing a multiscale approach in investigating ageing phenomena from a microscopic level to an industrially relevant scale in PEM electrolysis. Therefore, we perform various investigations such as electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), local conductivity measurements or determination of diffusion behavior in correlation with different operation parameters (flow rate, current density, etc). This is accompanied with extensive studies on post-test samples of membrane electrode assemblies (MEA). Different characterization methods such as electron microscopy (SEM, TEM), Atomic Force microscopy (AFM), X-ray computed tomography (XCT), Nuclear Magnetic resonance (NMR) and Raman spectroscopy as well as elastic scattering methods (XRD, SAXS) are used, to get a holistic picture of the ongoing changes in an electrolyzer during operation.References:1) German National Hydrogen Council: White Paper„ Update 2024: Greenhouse gas savings and the associated hydrogen demand in Germany”, 05th of May 2024. 2) Wang et al. Carbon Neutrality (2022) 1:21.
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