Development of water electrolyzers with additive manufacturing for efficient and low-cost energy conversion and storage

Hydrogen is considered as an environmentally friendly storage medium for renewable energies and has attracted extensive attention, since it can provide 2.5 times as much energy per unit mass as fossil fuels, and provide hazard-free products. As an effective method for hydrogen production, the proton exchange membrane electrolyzer cell (PEMEC) provides a number of advantages: rapid response to the power input, compact system design, high purity product (up to 99.995%), high operation current density (above 2 A/cm2), and high operation pressure (up to 350 bar). Due to insufficient performance and high cost of PEMEC stacks, the use of hydrogen as large-scale energy storage with PEMECs has been limited so far. Thus, low-cost and high-efficiency PEMECs are highly desirable to establish a clean and sustainable energy infrastructure. To bridge the gap between lab-scale and industrial hydrogen productions, the main objectives in this research include: (1) Exploring the possibility of application of metallic additive manufacturing (AM) on PEMECs. (2) Integrating the components of PEMECs into one part with better performance and compact system design by using AM technologies. (3) Bipolar plate development with AM and protective coating for durable and high-efficiency PEMECs. (4) Combination of AM non-conductive bipolar plate with thin film liquid/gas diffusion layers for low-cost hydrogen production. (5) Developing conductive mesoporous bi-material catalysts with ultra-high reaction sites and efficiency for oxygen evolution reaction in PEMEC by using advanced manufacturing. Those bipolar plates and membrane electrode assemblies (MEAs) with excellent electrochemical performance and low cost will open a pathway for developing widely available water electrolyzers or other energy conversion devices, such as batteries, solar cells, and fuel cells.

Portions of this document were previously published in International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, Applied Energy, and Journal of Power Sources.