Source: Energy & Management Powernews, January 20, 2022
Electrolyzers are expensive because they are largely manufactured by hand. In order to be able to produce them industrially in the future, the Fraunhofer IPA is developing automated manufacturing.
As hydrogen plays an important role in the energy and transport transition, the world will need masses of new electrolysers in the foreseeable future. But until now, these have largely been handmade, which takes a lot of time, is expensive and prone to errors. Scientists from the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA, together with partners from research and industry, therefore want to automate the production of electrolyzers end-to-end.
"The goal is an automated electrolyzer factory on a gigawatt scale," says Friedrich-Wilhelm Speckmann from the Center for Digitized Battery Cell Production (ZDB) at Fraunhofer IPA. The electrolyzers produced there within a year should thus have an added-up nominal output of at least 1,000 megawatts.
An electrolyzer essentially consists of two electrodes - the positively charged anode and the negatively charged cathode - and a separator, in this case a proton exchange membrane (PEM). To increase performance, many such electrolytic cells are stacked together to form a so-called stack. This stacking is still largely done by hand, but could be done by robots in the future.
But because not only stacking but the entire production line is to be automated, the researchers must also take into account all upstream and downstream processes, right up to the run-in of the complete systems. The tasks here range from factory and production planning to component testing and end-of-line test rigs. In addition, the consortium is also developing novel stack designs that will simplify and thus accelerate future production processes.
Robots and sensors for the electrolysis factory
In order to be able to realize the automated electrolysis factory, the project partners are first building a state-of-the-art production line. This will then be modularly adapted and expanded piece by piece so that the individual processes mesh better than before and run automatically. In the process, the scientists are clarifying a whole series of unanswered questions, for example: Which robot topology is best suited for stacking? How should a robot grip the components and what is the maximum speed at which it can move so as not to damage the sensitive components? Which optical sensors should be integrated into the system for quality assurance?
The research team wants to have found answers to these and many other questions by March 31, 2025. That's when the research project "Industrialization of PEM Electrolysis Production" (PEP.IN), which the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research is funding with more than 20 million euros, comes to an end. In addition to Fraunhofer IPA, the Fraunhofer Institutes ISE and Umsicht, MAN Energy Solutions SE, H-TEC Systems GmbH, Audi AG, VAF GmbH, Zentrum für Brennstoffzellen-Technik GmbH and Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH are involved in the joint project.
Alternative project focuses on alkaline water electrolysis
Also elsewhere in Germany, work is underway to industrialize electrolyzer production: With the "EcoLyzer BW" project, the Center for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg (ZSW) and the Ecoclean company are planning to develop an internationally competitive electrolysis system in series and bring it to market. In doing so, they are taking a somewhat different technological approach than the PEP.IN project.
The basis for Ecolyzer is a system technology developed by ZSW for alkaline water electrolysis in the 1-megawatt power class. Unlike other technologies (PEM or high-temperature electrolysis), it does not require the use of resource-critical precious metals and rare earths. "On the one hand, this makes it cheaper, and on the other hand, no raw material bottlenecks are to be expected during the market ramp-up," says Marc-Simon Löffler, head of the Department of Renewable Energy Sources and Processes.
When fully developed, the electrolyzer, which can be equipped with two blocks of 0.5 MW each, delivers about 20 kilograms of hydrogen per hour at an efficiency of about 70 percent - at a pressure level of 16 bar. The joint project with Ecoclean will run until March 2024 and is being funded by the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of the Environment with around 2.1 million euros.
Author: Peter Koller