Master assignment "Optimizing an electrochemical reactor for hollow fiber electrodes"
Motivation
Many chemical building blocks are produced via fossil based processes. There is a high demand for finding environmental friendly alternatives for these processes. An option of interest is electrochemistry. This is of interest because green energy from wind and solar, can be used to drive electrochemical processes. There is a focus on developing electrodes and electrode materials. However, to upscale electrochemical synthesis, reactor and process design start to play a role.
Hollow Fiber Electrodes
The hollow fiber electrode was developed at the University of Twente [1]. The hollow fiber electrode (HFE) is a small porous metal tube. A gas can be purged through the pores of the electrode. The electrodes can be made from various metals such as copper [1] and titanium [2]. A potential can be applied to the HFE since it is made of a metal. There are three advantages of HFEs. First, the production process is via a scalable dry-wet spinning procedure [2]. Second, the evolution of bubbles results in improved mass transport within the system [3]. Consequently, the electrochemical performance of the system increases. Last, if the reactant is a gas, it is very locally introduced at the active surface. All in all, these reasons make the HFE a promising technology.
Assignment
The research currently performed with HFEs, is all done in batch experiments. To upscale the technology, continuous operation is desired. A reactor was designed to test continuous operation. The reactor can be operated in various flow configurations (co-current, counter current, etc.). Furthermore, the length of the reactor can be altered. In this assignment, the influence of the flow configurations on the electrochemical performance will be studied. The same applies for the influence of the length of the reactor.
Contact
If you are interested in doing this assignment, or if you have further questions. Please contact Tessa de Koning Gans (t.dekoninggans@utwente.nl)
References
[1] Kas, R., Hummadi, K., Kortlever, R. et al. Three-dimensional porous hollow fibre copper electrodes for efficient and high-rate electrochemical carbon dioxide reduction. Nat Commun 7, 10748 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms10748
[2] Jong, Ronald & Krzywda, Piotr & Benes, Nieck & Mul, Guido. (2020). Preparation of Ti, Ti/TiC or Ti/TiN based hollow fibres with extremely low electrical resistivity. RSC Advances. 10. 31901-31908. 10.1039/D0RA04905K.
[3] Jong, Ronald & Mul, Guido. (2022). Gas flow Stimulated Hydrodynamics for Preparation and Application of Platinized Titanium Hollow Fibre Electrodes. ChemElectroChem. 9. 10.1002/celc.202101135.