News

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.

Our ENDURE partner Fraunhofer IFAM Dresden is present this week at the HANNOVER MESSE! If you happen to pass by, don't hesitate to come to their booth for more information about our project.

Stay updated with the last developments in alkaline electrolysis!

Our project partner Stargate Hydrogen delivered a 1MW electrolyser to Utilitas, the largest renewable energy producer in Estonia. This system will supply green hydrogen to a refuelling station that powers a fleet of vehicles operating in the city of Tallinn.

This act constitutes the first full value chain demonstration of green hydrogen production in the Baltic states.

The  ongoing deployment of renewable hydrogen systems in Europe follows the  latest technical developments in the field, which are themselves linked  to R&D activities in EU projects like ENDURE.

See the trailer HERE!

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.