Initial approaches in benchmarking and round robin testing for proton exchange membrane water electrolyzers

• Published in: International journal of hydrogen energy Vol. 44; no. 18
• Main Authors: Bender, G., Carmo, M., Smolinka, T., Gago, A., Danilovic, N., Mueller, M., Ganci, F., Fallisch, A., Lettenmeier, P., Friedrich, K. A., Ayers, K., Pivovar, B., Mergel, J., Stolten, D.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Elsevier 15-03-2019
• Subjects: 08 HYDROGEN; Benchmarking; Electrolysis; INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY; PEMWE; Protocol development; Round robin; State-of-the-art
• ISSN: 0360-3199; 1879-3487
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ijhydene.2019.02.074

As ever increasing amounts of renewable electricity enter the energy supply mix on a regional, national and international basis, greater emphasis is being placed on energy conversion and storage technologies to deal with the oscillations, excess and lack of electricity. Hydrogen generation via proton exchange membrane water electrolysis (PEMWE) is one technology that offers a pathway to store large amounts of electricity in the form of hydrogen. The challenges to widespread adoption of PEMWE lie in their high capital and operating costs which both need to be reduced through R&D. An evaluation of reported performance data in literature for PEMWE reveals that there are excessive variations of in situ performance results that make it difficult to draw conclusions on the pathway forward to performance optimization and future R&D directions. In order to enable the meaningful comparison of in-situ performance evaluation across laboratories there is an obvious need for standardization of materials and testing protocols. Herein, we address this need by reporting the results of a round robin test effort conducted at the laboratories of five contributors to the IEA electrolysis annex 30. The effort utilized common sets of test articles, materials, test cells, and employed a set of shared test protocols. The maximum observed deviation between laboratories at 1 A cm-2 at cell temperatures of 60 and 80 degrees C, was 27 and 20 mV, respectively. The deviation of the results from laboratory to laboratory was a factor of 2-3 higher than the lowest deviation observed at one single lab and test station. However, the highest deviations observed were 1/10th of those extracted by a literature survey on similar material sets. The biggest takeaways are that cell temperature control appears to be the most significant source of deviation between results, while care must be taken with respect to break in conditions and cell electrical connections for meaningful performance data.