Postdoc Computational fluid dynamics of alkaline water electrolysis

Functieomschrijving

Eindhoven University of Technology has a Postdoc vacancy in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. The project is part of a larger project (Alkaliflex), which is a collaboration with the Department of Chemical Engineering and financed by the Netherlands Enterprise Agency and industrial partner AkzoNobel Chemicals. The purpose of Alkaliflex is to gather information on the flexibility and productivity of current alkaline water electrolysis and to propose ideas for improvement. Improvement is needed in order to reduce the present cost of green production of hydrogen.

In the Multiphase and Reactive Flows Group, both numerical and experimental techniques are used to conduct research on various fundamental and applied topics relevant for the process industry.

Project description:
The goal of this post-doc project is to analyze various configurations of water electrolyzers by means of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. The performance of the reactors is influenced by multiphase flow phenomena (bubbles), turbulence, mass transfer of ionic species, heat transfer, electric field and potential, and turbulence. The following activities are envisaged:

1. Comparison of CFD tools (packages) for one configuration, in which above aspects play a role (programming of user-defined subroutines is probably required).
2. Computations for various geometries of electrolyzers, physical interpretation and comparison with experimental data that will become available in another part of the Alkaliflex project.
3. Investigation of fundamentals of above aspects, by means of direct numerical simulation of a small part of an electrolyzer, via usage and extension of an appropriate open-source or in-house code.

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