Experimental and analytical study of open pore cellular foam material on the performance of proton exchange membrane electrolysers

The aim of this research is to develop research methodology and provide insight into the viability of using Open Pore Cellular Foam (OPCF) material in Polymer Electrolyte Membrane (PEM) Electrolysers. Analysis have therefore been carried out on three different types of electrolyser geometries. A PEM electrolyser is considered with serpentine, mesh and OPCF flow channels, whilst all the other physical and operational parameters are kept constant. Three dimensional models have been created in solid works and computational fluid dynamic simulations have been carried out on all the three types of electrolysers in ANSYS Fluent. Experimental investigations have also been carried out using all the three different flow plate geometries. ANSYS simulation show that the performance of the OPCF flow channel electrolyser is 1.5 times higher than that of the mesh channel electrolyser. Experimental results have shown that using OPCF flow channel the performance of the electrolyser improves significantly by 17% to that compared with conventional mesh flow plate electrolysers.