Experimental and numerical study of flow in expanded metal plate for water electrolysis applications

Polymer electrolyte membrane water electrolysis (PEMEC) is a high-yield technique for hydrogen generation from renewable energy. One challenge for commercialisation of the technology is a low-cost and highly efficient flow plate. Flow plates are one of the most expensive parts of an electrolysis system, therefore a thorough study on alternative flow plate manufacturing methods pays off. Expanded metals have low manufacturing cost. Even though they are being used in different industries from electrochemistry to ventilation and air conditioning systems, there is little information available on their fluid flow behaviour. In this paper, the distribution of gas and liquid flow in expanded metal is analysed. Expanded metal flow resistance properties such as porosity, permeability and inertial resistance for two different sizes in both horizontal and vertical directions are determined. Alongside the experiments, two different computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations of flow in the experimental setup and the structure of the expanded metal was done.