Neutron imaging to study the influence of flow fields and porous electrodes on concentration distributions in redox flow cells
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Understanding reactive mass transport in redox flow reactors is key to improving performance, yet conventional characterization techniques often rely on cell-averaged metrics and fail to resolve local transport phenomena. In this study, we employ operando neutron radiography to visualize concentration distributions in redox flow cells with non-aqueous electrolytes, leveraging the high attenuation of hydrogen-containing organic molecules and boron-containing supporting ions. Symmetric flow cell experiments were conducted with three electrode types (paper, cloth, and a hierarchical porous electrode fabricated via non-solvent induced phase separation), and two flow field designs (parallel and interdigitated). We find that for kinetically facile electrolytes with low ionic conductivity and with parallel flow fields, electrodes with large pores in the though-plane direction (i.e., carbon cloth) augment the current output. Additionally, interdigitated flow fields sustain higher currents than parallel flow fields at a fixed potential and flow rate due to enhanced convective transport. Despite significant differences in macroscopic performance among the studied materials, the concentration profiles within the cell showed only minor variations within the studied operating conditions and imaging configuration. The cloth electrode and interdigitated flow field exhibited slightly more uniform concentration profiles across the electrode thickness compared to the paper electrode with the parallel flow field. In contrast, the phase-separation electrode displayed more steep concentration profiles and a stronger dependency on polarity reversal. Neutron radiography further uncovered critical secondary effects, including salt precipitation and flow field underutilization. These findings highlight the potential of operando imaging to inform the design and operation of electrochemical reactors for a range of technologies.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".