Hydrogen produced by water electrolysis with renewable electricity is a reliable, affordable and environmental friendly energy carrier for future energy supply and storage. Alkaline electrolysis and proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolysis are the most developed water electrolysis technologies. The former is well matured, but suffers from limited efficiency and insufficient compatibility with the intermittency of renewables, while the later thanks to its zero-gap design, is ideally suited to intermittent supply applications at scale, offering high current densities and high purity hydrogen generation. However, state-of-the-art PEM electrolysers, rely on the rare and expensive platinum-group-metals, which make the technology unsustainable in the long-term.
An emerging solution to the problems of alkaline and PEM electrolysis is the anion exchange membrane (AEM) electrolysis. This technology combines the beneficial zero-gap design and the low associated capital expenditure. However, till recently, AEMs were suffering from poor chemical stability. This situation has now been changed since AEMs with improved stability and conductivity have been commercialized, paving the way for the development of advanced AEM-electrolysers.
AEM electrolysis holds promise to be the most competitive technology in the near future, but the field is still rather unexplored. In lab scale there is a plethora of emerging materials with high intrinsic activity and sufficient stability, which thus show great potential to replace conventional alkaline electrocatalysts. However, performance screening has so far been performed only at low surface area planar electrodes in simulated conditions. Performance evaluation under realistic conditions requires the implementation of these electrocatalysts into suitable 3D architectures for facilitating mass and charge transport. SCALE project aims to fill this gap and bring the existing fundamental knowledge on emerging materials and advanced electrode architectures to industrial applications. Overall, SCALE goal is to set the scene for the next-generation of AEM electrolysers and promote the utilization of the generated knowledge.
