Model Adjustments and Solver Construction for Galvanic Cells Based on NPP‐Systems

ABSTRACT

Electroplated coatings on metallic substrates have a wide range of practical applications ranging from corrosion or wear protection on parts, good conductivity on electrical contacts to coating systems for bipolar plates in fuel cells. The large field of applications in electrochemical engineering motivates several questions for scientific computation, such as the simulation of coating thickness distributions and alloy‐composition distributions on the cathode, leading to nonlinearly coupled PDEs with nonlinear boundary conditions. Although in recent years many advances have been made in the scientific computation of electrochemical systems for electroplating, important questions are still open. These include the integration of large reaction systems into the models and their numerical treatment as they have a major impact on the electroplating process and the resulting layer. The given contribution addresses the modelling of reactions in the galvanic cell as well as electrode reactions specifically and constructs a suitable methodology to simulate the modelled system to obtain reliable and meaningful simulation results. In particular, convenient strategies to decouple and simplify the resulting large system of PDEs for efficient and comparingly fast simulations are addressed.