How DC Power Passes Through Multiple Cells in An Electrolyser Stack #PEM #electrolysis #hydrogen
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In this video. I'd like to give an extra example to last week's video. About how the. Power goes right through an electrolyzer stack between the cells. The anode is where the water is circulated. It's also the place where the hydrogen atom splits into one proton and one electron. The proton goes through the membrane and the electron goes off into the electrical connections, and the new electron will come and meet with the proton to form one hydrogen atom. But the issue, like we said, arises when we have multiple cells. In this scenario we have four different cells, and we've got the anode here, the cathode there. So for the first cell, we've got the water in the anode chamber, and the hydrogen splits into one proton, which goes through the membrane. However, we need to have an electron. But like we said, the membranes do not conduct electrons. So how do we get the electron from the negative side all the way up to, let's say, to the top cell? Well, what happens is that we get (this is also an anode chamber) and we get the proton and the electron split because we are splitting the hydrogen atom. And the proton. From this hydrogen atom goes over to the cathode below, but the electron will actually go back. So the hydrogen will split into the proton and the electron and the proton will go back and it will actually form a hydrogen atom over in this cell. This, then further cascades through the stack. So, again, we've got a hydrogen atom being split. The electron will go and join the proton that came from the next cell. So the electron will go back to the cell above, because, like we said, the bipolar plate is electrically conductive. However, the PEM membrane isn't. So the PEM membrane will allow the proton to go through, and again, the electron will come from the anode chamber in the cell below. And then the proton will go through the membrane here. And then from the electrical connections, we've got the final electron, which will join up with the proton above, and then it will form a hydrogen atom here. So this is how the power cascades through the stack. For us, it seems like the power just goes right through the stack, but it doesn't. It cascades through. And this is how it works.