PIV Study on Buoyant Bubble Flows in a Small Electrolytic Cell

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Water electrolysis has been recently recognized as a very important technology for hydrogen production. It has been well-known that electrolytic bubbles cause an increase in effective resistivity of the electrolyte, and there have been many electrochemical studies of the bubble dispersion effects on electrolysis characteristics. There are, however, very few studies that measure the growing phenomenon of bubbles from generation to departure on an electrode surface, the bubble rising velocity distribution and the void fraction in the interelectrode gap; moreover, their effects on the electric resistance characteristics have not been discussed extensively. We conducted an experimental study focusing on a small-scale electrolytic cell for hydrogen production in order to resolve the these issues, and discussed the fluid forces (surface tension, buoyancy, drag) acting on hydrogen bubbles from a viewpoint of gas-liquid two-phase flow. We used a PIV technique with a high-speed video camera and a shallow focal image system. As a result, we were able to successfully capture the images of hydrogen bubbles during the growth, and found that there was a linear relationship between log(We) and log(Re), where We is the Weber number and Re is the Reynolds number for a circulation type of the electrolytic cell. We also found an optimal gap between two electrodes when the flow pattern changes from bubbly flow to plug flow.
日本混相流学会の論文