Current and potential distribution in electrochemical reactors with activated or resistive electrodes. A multiregion and open source approach

An open source compact and general tool, implemented in OpenFOAM including a novel solver with a new boundary condition and post-processing utilities, is derived to enable calculations of local current and potential distributions in electrochemical systems with activated or resistive electrodes and also leakage currents in the case of a bipolar connection. The algorithm allows the calculations for a given local potential in any electrode, for a fixed cell potential difference and also for a current flowing through the cell under galvanostatic control. In order to validate the algorithm, a detailed comparison between the suggested strategy with experimental results and some simplified theoretical models is made. It was concluded that the proposed mathematical treatment is reliable for the modelling of these electrochemical systems due to the good agreement between theoretical and experimental values with a mean relative percent error of 8.8 ± 2.1% for the current distribution for the whole set of experiments. •An open source algorithm was validated with theoretical and experimental results.•A multiregion approach avoids current conservation at electrodes as constrain.•The increase in current produces a less uniform current distribution.•Feeding by the middle point decrease the leakage current.•Resistive electrodes affect negatively the reactor performance.