H2 purity control of high-pressure alkaline electrolyzers

DAVID, MARTÍN; BIANCHI, FERNANDO; CARLOS OCAMPO-MARTÍNEZ; SANCHEZ PEÑA, RICARDO SALVADOR

Venecia

Conferencia; IFAC Advanced Control of Chemical Processes; 2021

International Federation of Automatic Control

This paper proposes a control strategy that mitigates the cross contamination of H2and O2 in a high-pressure alkaline electrolyzer, which consequently increases the supplied gasespurity. In order to reduce the diusion of gases through the membrane, the controller establishesthe opening of two outlet valves based on the pressure of the system and the dierence in liquidlevel between both separation chambers. Therefore, a multiple input - multiple output optimalcontroller is designed here. For this purpose, an available high-delity model was simplied inorder to obtain a control-oriented model. The proposed controller was evaluated in simulationusing the high-delity nonlinear model in a wide operating range and was compared with a pairof decoupled PI controllers. The resulting impurity of gases was below 1% in all cases