Design and Analysis of Mechanical Gripper Technologies for Handling Mesh Electrodes in Electrolysis Cell Production

Abstract

As climate change accelerates, the demand for green energy is growing significantly. Due to the intermittent nature of renewable energy, the need for long-term storage is growing at the same rate. Hydrogen presents itself as a promising option for long-term storage, the need for electrolysis plants is therefore increasing significantly. Solutions for scaling up alkaline electrolysis production are currently lacking, particularly in the handling of large mesh electrodes. Therefore, new gripping concepts and technologies have to be developed to enable precise and automated handling of the electrodes, as established handling methods have failed due to the porous, limp and weakly magnetic material properties. This paper therefore presents two new ingressive gripping technologies in the form of individual gripping elements, which can later be combined to form a gripper. The technologies identified here are based on a threaded structure on the one hand and a spiral-like structure on the other. Depending on the mesh geometry to be handled, the gripper elements are designed accordingly. In order to grip the mesh, the gripping element is moved forward and turned at the same time. For verification, sample gripper elements were tested for a range of mesh geometries. The individual gripper elements were produced using selective Laser melting process (SLM), as the fine structures would be exceedingly challenging as well as very costly to produce using conventional manufacturing methods. The gripper elements were tested for three aspects of the handling process: Reliability, retention force and precision. The results in finer meshes show a high holding force for the spiral structures, while the screw structures show more potential in precision. In terms of performance in finer meshes, both structures have potential for use in mesh electrodes, with the low retention force of the screw structures due to the increasing imprecision of the SLM process.