News

Improving the durability of hydrogen generation is key to scaling up a sustainable energy future. Within the ENDURE project the Centre for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg (ZSW) has now developed a framework for accelerated stress tests (ASTs) for alkaline electrolysis electrodes – based on the findings of reports JRC133726 and JRC122565 from the Joint Research Centre.

In the future, AST investigations should provide information about the long-term behavior of electrodes by accelerating degradation processes representative of real operation. Therefore, AST protocols are to be designed to simulate these processes by systematically applying defined stressor types in a controlled and separated manner. As a first step, ZSW developed 14 single-cell AST protocols addressing the following stress categories:

• Dynamic load

• Excessive load

• Repetitive on–off cycling

• Reverse currents

• Electrolyte impurities

All protocols are described in detail in our report, which is published on our project homepage. These AST-protocols are intended to support a harmonized and reproducible approach to durability testing in alkaline electrolysis. The protocols now need to be experimentally validated. First results, applying a Raney nickel cathode in a half cell, indicate that excessive current densities above 2 A cm⁻² and reverse-current operation lead to pronounced electrode degradation.

Altogether, the developed protocols represent an important step toward more consistent and comparable durability testing in alkaline electrolysis.

An important paper is out for the ENDURE consortium: Anna Müller from IFAM Dresden conducted this study on highly active coatings for alkaline electrolysis.

Summary:

In our recent paper, we demonstrate a highly active Ni–Mo catalyst for alkaline HER (−89 mV at −1 A cm⁻²) and show that the true active phase consists of Ni-rich Ni₁₀Mo nanoparticles anchored on MoO₂ rather than the frequently assumed Ni₄Mo phase. By clarifying the active species and the role of the Ni₁₀Mo/MoO₂ interface, this work provides valuable insights into the design of efficient, PGM-free cathodes for alkaline water electrolysis under industrial conditions. This improved understanding of the structure–property relationship is essential for scaling up non-PGM catalysts for AEL and enable the transfer of this concept to related technologies such as AEM water electrolysis and, potentially, beyond.

This paper can be direclty downloaded from our website.

Good news for the ENDURE project: two of our innovations have been detected by the European Commission Innovation Radar!

The first innovation is literally at the core of the alkaline electrolysis technology:
🔹Innovation Title: High-Performance, Durable, Zero-Gap Alkaline Stack Design for Cost-Competitive Green Hydrogen Production.
🔹Market Maturity of the Innovation: Tech Ready.
🔹Market Creation Potential of the innovation: Noteworthy.
🔹Key Innovators: Stargate Hydrogen, Université catholique de Louvain and Fraunhofer IFAM Dresden.

The second innovation brings the necessary modeling tools for advanced cell and stack design:
🔹Innovation  Title: Validated multi-level CFD modelling coupled with advanced X-ray  tomography for electrolyser cell- and stack-level optimisation.
🔹Market Maturity of the Innovation: Exploring.
🔹Market Creation Potential of the innovation: High.
🔹Key Innovators: Stargate Hydrogen and Université catholique de Louvain.

This information will soon be accessible on the European Commission's Innovation Radar platform.

Here ends another crazy week for the ENDURE consortium: after our positive online mid-term review on Tuesday with the European Commission, we gathered together in Stuttgart at ZSW for another of our special 2-day general assembly marathons on Thursday and Friday.

In short – and although not much about this gathering can really be called short – nothing could stop our technical discussions. Neither the coffee breaks, the lunch breaks, the toilet breaks, the local lab tour, the common dinner and the short walks in between those events; nor the management, dissemination and communication discussions, which had to be postponed to our regular online meetings.

The electrode development team is wrapping up its most promising candidates and preparing its first scientific publication drafts. The electrodes developed in the first half of ENDURE are already being tested in their upscaled versions in various types of demonstrators, while the baseline stack is running and the design of the prototype stack is undergoing subtle refinements; all of these elements converging towards intensification of alkaline electrolysis on a term that could not possibly be made shorter.

Thank you, Ben Haugk and Tobias Ludwig, for your warm welcome and the perfect organization of this assembly. Soon, the ENDURE project will enter its final year, and given how much energy we have put so far in our developments, we can safely assume that we have not seen yet all the fruits of our work.

ENDURE will be well represented next week at the ICE 2025 conference in Freiburg. Two posters and one talk, all of them will take place on the first day, Monday 25.08.25.

First, during the AEL: Catalysts and Electrodes session at 11:20, Anna Katharina Müller will present her talk: “Ni-Mo nanoparticles supported on MoO2 as highly active electrocatalyst for hydrogen production in alkaline water electrolysis”, highlighting electrode development advances within the project.

Then, during the poster session between 15:20 and 16:50, feel free to pass by our posters! Lidia Martínez Izquierdo will answer your questions about the “Validation of ENDURE testing protocols using a 10 kW baseline stack with Ni foam electrodes”, a crucial step towards the upscaling of the technology developed at the electrode level.

And during the same poster session, Renaud Delmelle will discuss the “Interplay between structure and electrocatalytic activity in flow-engineered three-dimensional porous transport electrodes for alkaline electrolysis”, focusing on novel electrode structures for efficient bubble evacuation.

See you there!

UCLouvain celebrates its 600th anniversary with a very special exhibition at the Musée L in Louvain-la-Neuve. The exhibition is called Happy U! and lasts from 05.06.2025 to 22.02.2026. That’s plenty of time to pass by!

The exhibition is structured as a flat, with the lounge dedicated to personalities who left their mark on the university, the corridor tracing the key steps of its evolution, the library revealing its hidden treasures and the terrace debating major issues faced by researchers today.

Actually, I forgot to mention one room here: the kitchen, where visitors are invited to have a look behind the scenes of modern research, following concrete examples of current (running) research projects. We are proud to announce that ENDURE is among the showcased projects (click HERE!)

More information about the Happy U! exhibition HERE.

More information about the intergration of ENDURE in the exhibition HERE.

This year at the World Hydrogen Summit & Exhibition in Rotterdam, Rainer Küngas — CTO and co-founder of Stargate Hydrogen — presented the ENDURE project, focusing on its current scientific and technical challenges.

The ENDURE team is developing new 3D-structured porous transport electrodes (PTEs) to boost how efficiently electrolysers operate. These improvements help both the chemical reactions and the flow of gaseous products inside the electrolyser. It is only though optimizing this interplay between PTE structure and electrochemical activity that substantial intensification is possible in alkaline electrolysis, notably without the use of platinum-group metals. In the ENDURE project, performance is pushed together with durability.

Such complex electrodes are designed with the help of numerical tools: computational fluid dynamics (CFD) comes not only as a standard backup for experimental data, but as predictive tool for electrode design.

Watch the presentation using the link HERE, and check the slides of the presentation in our download center!

The ENDURE consortium has a new tool to connect with potential partners and investors: the Horizon Results Platform from the European Commission. Please check our page HERE for more information on the development of our porous transport electrodes for alkaline electrolysis!

The third ENDURE general assembly took place on 20th and 21st of May 2025 in Rotterdam, in parallel with the World Hydrogen Summit & Exhibition, where our project was also presented by Rainer Küngas from Stargate Hydrogen.

Our GA at a glance: The next generation of electrodes for alkaline electrolysis is on the way. Many candidates have the potential to intensify the process, now we have to choose wisely among them, not only in terms of performance but also in terms of upscalability and durability. About the latter, various stacks of different sizes are currently putting these electrodes to the real-life test. And what if the current stacks are not adapted to these next-generation electrodes? We also cover this topic, as new stack concepts are being developed, with the help of numerical simulation tools.

And again, we are back to our respective laboratories, full of ideas and enthusiasm. We are only halfway through but we can already say that this consortium is running really well. Many thanks to the Stargate team for the organisation of the GA!

At Fraunhofer IFAM in Dresden, we combine expertise in hydrogen production and additive manufacturing. This is used, for example, in the production of graded electrodes for water electrolysis. Together with our partners in the “Endure” (grant agreement No. 101137925) funding project, we are driving forward this development for more efficient hydrogen production.

The porosity can be adjusted in materials produced by sintering. When hydrogen is produced by electrolysis, graded porous electrodes are used as transport layers. 3D-structured electrodes drastically expand the catalytic surface. The increase in the amount of gas produced makes efficient gas bubble transport all the more important. Using additive screen printing technology, porous nickel layers can be optimised in terms of their thickness (10–1000 µm) and pore size (1–300 µm) and printed on other template structures (mesh, foam, fleece). In addition, a structure can be incorporated into the printed layer with high resolution.