Self-Discharge of a Proton Exchange Membrane Electrolyzer: Investigation for Modeling Purposes.

The self-discharge phenomenon results in a decrease of the open-circuit voltage (OCV), which occurs when an electrochemical device is disconnected from the power source. Although the self-discharge phenomenon has widely been investigated for energy storage devices such as batteries and supercapacitors, no previous works have been reported in the literature about this phenomenon for electrolyzers. For this reason, this work is mainly focused on investigating the self-discharge voltage that occurs in a proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolyzer.