Development of the standard water electrolyzers and measurement methods

Abstract

Recently, the hydrogen production using renewable energy has been attracting strong attention. However, the basic technology for the evaluation of element in the water electrolyzer has not been established at present. In this study, we developed a standard cell for the element evaluation of the water electrolysis. In this report, we introduce the feature of the developed cell. This standard cell has the two excellent features. The first function is the precise pressure control structure to the electrode area. The precise pressure setting for the electrode area is extremely important for the performance of electrolysis because the shortage of pressure to the electrode area occurs not only the increase of contact resistance but also the influence of the effective utilization ration of catalyst or the mass transfer resistance in some cases. The second function is the precise measurement for the polarization by using two reference electrodes. The newly developed evaluation method can measure the anode and cathode polarization and mass transfer overpotential. These functions can accelerate the development of electrolyzer compositions by optimizing the structure. We except that this standard cell will be used as a powerful tool to improve the fundamental technology of water electrolysis.