A Novel Inverse Analysis Method to Identify Concentration and Current Density Distributions on Electrode Surface

A novel method to identify accurate polarization characteristics for concentration dependent electrochemical reaction was developed. This method identifies polarization characteristics which is dependent of concentration on electrode surface of flow cell. Since the concentration on the electrode surface sitting in a flow cell cannot be measured directly, inverse analysis approach is applied. As the observation information of this inverse problem, total currents on the electrode are measured with different bulk concentration. The unknown polarization characteristics are expressed with piecewise linear function with unknown parameters. The relationship between observation and unknown parameters are modeled with advection-diffusion equation. The fluid velocity field of the flow cell is modeled with Navier-Stokes equation. These equations are discretized by finite volume method. In order to validate the proposed method, identification using both numerically generated data and experimental data were performed. The validation result demonstrated the good accuracy of the method.