Research Projects

India's goal of producing five million tons of green hydrogen per year by 2030 has sparked a flurry of research into efficient and cost-effective methods of producing green hydrogen. The electrolysis process, in which water molecules are deprotonated into hydrogen and oxygen under the influence of a large potential gap, is the most environmentally-safe and sustainable method for producing hydrogen. The potential gap between two electrodes (cathode and anode) is maintained to create baubles of ions (anion and cation), which are then trapped, separated, and concealed for later use as fuels. However, because it requires the use of precious metals as electrodes, it is both expensive and inefficient. To reduce the unit cost of hydrogen fuel produced via water-electrolysis, it is critical to develop highly active, stable, and low-cost electrochemical catalyst capable of maximizing hydrogen production efficiency. The advancement of additive manufacturing, particularly wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM), provided significant advantages for the development of functionally graded materials (FGMs). The WAAM is a relatively unexplored, high-potential, cost-effective, sustainable, and energy-efficient process that deposits multiple materials, such as stainless steel (SS) and nickel (Ni), layer by layer in a predetermined sequence to develop FGMs for green hydrogen electrode production. However, developing efficient FGMs for hydrogen production necessitates a unique design approach as well as rigorous experimental studies for optimization. As a result, a novel pyramidal composition gradient (PCG) strategy is proposed in this proposal to obtain diversified fractions of SS-Ni transition metals. The proposal's main goal is to design and develop a scalable, cost-effective, indigenous, and energy-saving method for manufacturing green hydrogen energy fuel cell electrodes.