1 CFD Modeling of Gas-Liquid Flows in Water Electrolysis Units

This paper presents the results of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling of gas-liquid flows in water electrolysis systems. CFD is used as a cost-effective design tool at Stuart Energy Systems Corporation (SESC) to optimize the performance of different water electrolysis units produced by SESC. General-purpose CFD software is used as a framework for analyzing the gas-liquid flow characteristics (pressure, gas and liquid velocities, gas and liquid volume fractions). The analysis is based on solving the coupled two-fluid conservation equations under typical and alternative operating conditions with appropriate boundary conditions, turbulence models and constitutive inter-phase correlations. Numerical results have been validated based on the experimental data available for a low-pressure cell