News

On 19.11.2024 in Louvain-la-Neuve, representatives of the local industry and public deciders will exchange on the status and future developments of the Smart Specialisation Strategy (S3) in Wallonia through presentations, discussions, round-tables and networking. With the help of this powerful EU lever, the southern part of Belgium unites efforts from its 4 main actors - regional and local authorities, research and innovation actors, the business community, and civil society - in order to define priorities and work on the implementation of long-term growth strategies.

The concept of Smart Specialisation Strategy (S3) was introduced by the European Commission as part of its growth and jobs agenda, with the aim of providing European regions with a new generation of regional research and innovation strategies. It is a strategic approach to economic development, allowing each region to identify and develop its own competitive advantages.

More on S3 HERE.

Nine months after our  kick-off meeting in Tallinn, the ENDURE consortium had its second  physical general assembly in Dresden, hosted by our project partner  Fraunhofer IFAM. The meeting took place this Tuesday, i.e. the day  before the 7th IFAM workshop on Advanced Alkaline Electrolysis, giving  the opportunity for the ENDURE consortium members to attend too.

What  a wonderful meeting! Results flowing in all directions, ideas  sparkling, growing and coalescing like hydrogen bubbles in a potassium  hydroxide solution. Honesty, rigor, openness, involvement from every  partner. What a consortium.

And what a  constructive week! Thanks to the IFAM team, for the organisation of both  the GA and the workshop. Now let's move forward together and keep on  pushing alkaline electrolysis to new performance standarts.

EU projects like ENDURE  typically last a few years. Technology breakthroughs are typically  demonstrated using state of the art materials, but what about long-term  performance degradation? Is it really possible to address this crucial  topic in such a short time frame?

The  answer is yes, thanks to Accelerated Stress Testing (AST) protocols  developed by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission.  In its latest version, titled "EU harmonised accelerated stress testing  protocols for low-temperature water electrolyser" by T. Malkow and A.  Pilenga, the AST publication details details all the relevant parameters  for such tests. Following these protocols is crucial for comparison of  performance degradation results between the three main low-temperature  water electrolysis technologies.

The ENDURE projects fully integrates these protocols in its stack testing activities. As a matter of fact,  ENDURE project partners Fundación Hidrógeno Aragón, Stargate Hydrogen,  Fraunhofer IFAM as well as the ENDURE consortium as a whole provided  input for the development of this document.

More information on this document HERE.

The EU H2020 NEXTAEC projet - Materials for Next Generation Alkaline Electrolysers, Grant no. 862509 - ended about six months ago. Just like in the present ENDURE project, UCLouvain was involved in the consortium as an academic partner, focusing on the development of new electrode designs.

NEXTAEC was the cradle for the concept of laterally-graded, bi-layer foam electrodes for alkaline electrolysis. These electrodes combine high activity and efficient bubble removal in a unique way, so unique that we are proud to announce that we made it to Nature Communications! 

You can find the article HERE.

These bi-layer foam electrodes were the basis for the new concepts of porous transport electrodes currently developed within the ENDURE project. Such a strong synergy between successive EU projects is a sign of significant breakthrough.