Dynamics of charged particles dissolved in water in an electrolytic cell

Abstract

When fresh water and seawater meet, a huge amount of entropy is produced due to ionic mixing. This entropy leads to a dissipation of free energy at river mouths. At the moment, a lot of research is being done on this process to harvest this so-called (clean) \textit{blue energy}. Multiple cycles have been proposed to generate the maximum energy per cycle and make use of the equilibrium potential and density profiles to calculate this energy. However, when the maximum amount of work or energy per time is being researched, the dynamics of the dissolved charged particles in water must be taken into account. This research focuses on these dynamics of charged particles in an electrolytic cell and aims to to describe the potential and density profiles for three different electrolytic cell models. We use the Poisson-Boltzmann equation and a set of numerical techniques to analyze these models. We first describe the Posson-Boltzman equation in the standard Gouy-Chapman-Stern model and extend this view to the Modified Poisson-Boltzmann equation. Thereafter, we develop a method to describe the dynamics in an electrolytic cell by combining the Poisson-Boltzmann equation and the Nernst-Planck equation.