Journal
JOURNAL OF THE ELECTROCHEMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 167, Issue 11, Pages -Publisher
ELECTROCHEMICAL SOC INC
DOI: 10.1149/1945-7111/aba792
Keywords
Water Electrolysis; Hydrogen production; Alkaline Water Electrolyzer; Steel Electrodes; Oxygen Evolution; Hydrogen Evolution
Funding
- Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute
- University of Southern California
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Electrolysis of aqueous solutions of alkali is a promising approach for the production of pure hydrogen. For this approach to be economical on a large scale, the overpotentials for the electrode reactions and the high-cost of nickel-based electrode substrates must be reduced. We report here on the performance of an all-iron electrolyzer cell that uses inexpensive steel-based electrodes. This alkaline water electrolyzer uses a steel mesh coated with a thin catalytic coating of alpha-nickel hydroxide for the oxygen evolution electrode, and another steel mesh sputter-coated with nickel and molybdenum for the hydrogen electrode. An alkaline electrolyzer with these steel-based electrodes, a commercial Zirfon separator, and a solution of 30% potassium hydroxide exhibited an electrolysis cell voltage of 1.83 V and 1.71 V at 100 mA cm(-2)when operating at 23 degrees C and 70 degrees C, respectively. We show that the performance of the steel-based electrodes is comparable to commercial electrodes based on nickel substrates. When the cell was operated continuously for 100 h at 1 A cm(-2)at 23 degrees C, there was no measurable loss in performance, providing a preliminary confirmation of the robustness of these iron-based electrodes and electrocatalysts. We conclude that cost-effective iron-based electrolyzers could be a promising route to low-cost hydrogen production.
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