Welcome back to a new edition of #MeetOurPartners! Today, we have the pleasure of introducing our researcher Lisa Titze, who works at Industrie De Nora SpA, in Italy.
Titze studied Chemistry at the Italian University of Milan–Bicocca. After a short stay at another company, she joined De Nora, where she is now a scientist in one of the company’s research groups based in Milan.
“My expertise is mainly in electrode design and manufacturing,” she says. Considering that De Nora is the world’s largest supplier of metal-coated electrodes, with chlor-alkali electrolysis and mining as its main application areas, the company is an ideal place for our researcher to be. It was precisely at De Nora where Titze discovered the world of green hydrogen, which she found particularly interesting.
Within ANEMEL, one of Titze’s main tasks is, of course, electrode manufacturing. More specifically, she is involved in the fabrication of both anodic and cathodic electrodes incorporating the catalysts from Work Package 1 (WP1). At DeNora, they have established protocols to carry out this work and to test the effectiveness of the electrodes. “Testing is one of the most important parts [of the process], because to improve the electrode, you have to assess its performance,” she says.
“We began with an initial benchmarking phase, using some commercially available electrodes, as well as others that we prepared in our laboratories. We then started to include the first catalysts supplied by the other ANEMEL WPs and assembled all the components together: the catalyst, the ionomer, and the different types of substrates for the anode and the cathode. All of these are combined to obtain what we can refer to as the final formulations,” she explains.
This process requires some optimisation, as the catalysts provided by our partners are based on new materials. To achieve this, Titze has worked on formulating inks containing both the desired catalysts and the ionomer, as well as perfecting deposition techniques onto sustainable substrates to obtain robust and efficient electrodes. The ionomer acts as a binder –the main component keeping the catalyst adhered to the surface of the substrate, while also helping with conductivity.
“You then add the solvent and mix everything together. The ink is deposited onto the surface of the selected substrate and dried to remove the solvent, usually water. At that point, the electrode is complete”, explains Titze.
This is not a straightforward task. There are many variables to consider, and the role of Titze and the team at De Nora is to adjust all of them, modifying some while keeping others constant. In this controlled way, she can check for improvements. As Titze puts it, “we have a lot of different recipes”. For instance, at the beginning of the project there were only a couple of catalysts from other WPs to test, but this number increased as the project progressed. Also, “there are many different methods to prepare these types of inks, as well as different properties that the inks must have in order to be suitable for application.”
Titze is also involved in the scale-up process of the electrodes. At De Nora, they produce electrodes on the scale of square metres. Although that’s too big for ANEMEL, where we only need a few square centimetres, it is of great help to have a partner with such a capability and, more importantly, the experience in exploitation. Titze’s goal is to optimise everything, from the inks to the electrode manufacturing process itself, so that our electrodes are in the best shape to be part of bigger electrolysers.
Thanks to her work, and the team at De Nora, ANEMEL now counts on the final formulations for the electrodes, ready to be integrated into our electrolysers and to face the final challenge: operating efficiently and continuously for 2,000 hours.