Publication

H2 purity control for highpressure alkaline electrolyzers

Conference Article

Conference

IFAC International Symposium on Advanced Control of Chemical Processes (ADCHEM)

Edition

2021

Pages

109-114

Doc link

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ifacol.2021.08.227

File

Download the digital copy of the doc pdf document

Abstract

This paper proposes a control strategy that mitigates the cross contamination of H2 and O2 in a high-pressure alkaline electrolyzer, which consequently increases the supplied gases purity. In order to reduce the diffusion of gases through the membrane, the controller establishes the opening of two outlet valves based on the pressure of the system and the difference in liquid level between both separation chambers. Therefore, a multiple input - multiple output optimal controller is designed here. For this purpose, an available high-fidelity model was simplified in order to obtain a control-oriented model. The proposed controller was evaluated in simulation using the high-fidelity nonlinear model in a wide operating range and was compared with a pair of decoupled PI controllers. The resulting impurity of gases was below 1% in all cases.

Categories

automation, control theory, optimisation.

Author keywords

Hydrogen, alkaline electrolysis, H2 purity, multivariable control

Scientific reference

M.R. David, F. Bianchi, C. Ocampo-Martínez and R. Sánchez-Peña. H2 purity control for highpressure alkaline electrolyzers, 2021 IFAC International Symposium on Advanced Control of Chemical Processes, 2021, Venice, Italy, pp. 109-114.