Simulation of PEMEC / SOEC in ANSYS Fluent. How?
 

Hello everyone.

For my Master Thesis, I tried to simulate a PEMEC electrolyser, in where I fed it with H2O and I'd get H2 in the cathode and O2 in the anode. The protons would pass through the membrane. I ended up noticing that Fluent doesn't support Electrolysis with two phases, so only High-Temperature Electrolysis is supported.

That meant that I had to focus now on SOEC. When I model I noticed that, if I select the right source terms (production of O2 in the anode and production of H2 in the cathode), then my electrolyser doesn't work. If I select the opposite, which means that if I try to create H2 in the anode and O2 in the cathode, it works.

Also, it is worth appreciating that the source term seems that consider that the H2 reaction for electrolysers is taking place in the anode, as well as the O2 reaction would take place in the cathode.

I still haven't got a proper solution to my simulations, either they produce no Hydrogen or Oxygen, or they got produced on the wrong side, and I would like to get some advice on how to model the electrolyser.

Thank you so much :)

Raúl

Solved!
 

You can ask me on LinkedIn to know more about it:

www.linkedin.com/in/raulsotillo

Hi,

Have you solved the problem? I noticed that the fuel electrode of the electrolyzer is called 'anode' in Fluent. Is it the answer to your query?


Note that, conventionally, the negative voltage is supplied to the cathode side in power consuming devices such as electrolyzers. ANSYS Fluent adopts the inverse notation where the negative voltage is supplied to the anode side whilst cathode remains positively charged. The main reason for this discrepancy
is that the same infrastructure is used for both the electrolysis and fuel cells models. Usage of the terms "anode" and "cathode" in this manual and in the user interface should be interpreted according to conventions for power-supplying devices.
-- Fluent17 user manual

Hello. I could solve the problem and yeah it was that! Thank you so much! :)

Hi, I am trying to simulate soec using sofc addon module 3, do i put h2o on anode side, o2 at cathode side, 0V at anode, and negative voltage at cathode?