A novel electrochemical flow cell for enhanced electrochemical processing

Talk location confirmed as Scott Suite, Edinburgh Business School

Electrochemical processes are powerful tools for many industrial transformations, but they have yet to be optimised in many applications because mass transport remains a limitation. Surface-mediated reactions require effective mixing for them to be intense and efficient. In electrochemistry where the reactants must contact electrode surfaces for a sufficient time to enable electron tunnelling to occur, exhaustive electrolysis in poorly stirred reactors can take days to complete. As a consequence, electrochemical processing in many industries is restricted to batch processing which is more costly and labor intensive than continuous processing and results in significant down time between batches. This is not ideal for bulk production or treatment. CSIRO has developed a novel axial flow electrochemical reactor (Figure 1) to address these issues by employing computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modelling to design and additively manufacture high surface area static mixers which act as central working electrodes. Evaluation of the CSIRO flow electrochemical cell shows that it performs best where mass transport plays a significant role in the reaction rate. Under this condition, CSIRO’s flow electrochemical cell can enhance the electrochemical reaction rate up to thirty times compared to a traditional tubular flow cell reactor. Furthermore, the cell performance can be enhanced further by coating the static mixer electrodes with electrocatalysts suited to the application. This flow cell has application in a wide range of fields because of its flexibility in design such as water purification, water disinfection, material electrosynthesis, energy conversion and storage