Publication date: 10th April 2024
Water electrolysis presents challenges to increase performance, economic value, and deployment. These challenges result from the co-production of hydrogen and oxygen in the same electrolytic cell, as well as from substantial energy losses. To prevent hydrogen and oxygen mixing, the electrolytic cell is divided by a membrane into cathodic and anodic compartments. This membrane architecture complicates the electrolyzers construction by adding gaskets and compression plates to prevent gas crossover, increasing cost and weight, and limiting high pressure operation. In addition, substantial energy losses, mostly due to the difficult oxygen evolution reaction (OER), increase the cost of energy.
To overcome these challenges, we developed alternative processes that decouple the generation of hydrogen and oxygen into: (1) separate electrolytic cells with alternating auxiliary buffer electrodes that mediate the ion exchange between the anodic and cathodic reactions [1]; (2) consecutive electrochemical and thermally-activated chemical stages in the same cell [2]; and (3) separate electrolytic and catalytic cells [3]. These configurations avoid the need for expensive membranes and sealing, leading to membraneless electrolysis architectures. In addition, by dividing the OER, a difficult electrochemical reaction that requires four electrons and protons to generate an O2 molecule on a single atomic reaction site, into electrochemical and chemical sub-reactions that occur on four sites [2] or in soluble redox couple [3], the energy loss for oxygen evolution is reduced, leading to high efficiency. The advantages and challenges of the different approaches will be discussed at the conference.
Funded by the European Union (ERC, H2Bro, grant number 101097966). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
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