Quality Assurance in the Series Production of Electrolyzers

It is not yet clear exactly how high Germany's demand for green hydrogen will be in the future. However, it is clear that demand will amount to several hundred million tons of hydrogen per year. The goal of the National Hydrogen Strategy is to establish 5 GW of electrolysis capacity by 2030 in Germany alone – the expansion target has been raised to 10 GW in the new coalition agreement.

This requires efficient, durable, robust, inexpensive, and scalable electrolysers. Although large electrolysers that operate efficiently and over long periods of time are already available on the market, they are still largely manufactured by hand. This is time-consuming, cost-intensive, and prone to errors. The series production of electrolysers that can be modularly adapted to their respective locations would be a significant step forward – also in terms of making green hydrogen competitive.

The H2Giga flagship project is therefore committed to the development of series production of electrolysers – and is open to all technologies. Together, established electrolyzer manufacturers, suppliers from various technology sectors – including many small and medium-sized enterprises – as well as research institutions and universities are advancing existing electrolysis technologies.

Summary

Development of novel, highly scalable production processes for the large-scale production of electrolyzers, further development of industrial production processes for electrolyzers

Research topics IMWS

• Characterization of electrolyzer components and systems, identification of relevant microstructural defects and analysis of their influence on performance, as well as the development of suitable concepts for their cost-effective avoidance or minimization
• Testing and development of concepts for in-line analytics and defect identification

Focus

Accompanying analytics during component production (CCM, BPP, PTL, stack) with a focus on in-line and operando suitability, identification of relevant defects in production.

Methods

SEM, TEM, EDX, CT, XRD, XPS, ToF-SIMS, IR spectroscopy, magnetic field measurement, lock-in thermography, LIBS