Congratulations to Oliver Kupfer on his diploma defense

On June 23, 2025, Oliver Kupfer successfully defended his diploma thesis on the topic of
"Flow behavior of a water-oxygen mixture in a plate heat exchanger" and thus complete his studies. The research work was carried out at the Chair of Energy Process Engineering at TU Dresden and supervised by Dipl.-Ing. Montadhar Guesmi. It is part of the BMBF lead project H2Giga, which supports the expansion of large-scale hydrogen production using PEM electrolysis.

A central contribution of TU Dresden within the project is the investigation of the anode cycle with a focus on two-phase flow in heat exchangers. The focus of the work was the experimental analysis of the water-oxygen two-phase flow in the plate gap chamber, with the aim of better understanding the flow behavior and pressure loss under different operating conditions.

For this purpose, different plate configurations were investigated under realistic conditions and recorded using high-speed cameras. The evaluation was carried out both qualitatively and quantitatively using specially developed image processing algorithms for bubble segmentation and detection.

The knowledge gained enables a detailed analysis of bubble size distributions, phase distributions and characteristic flow patterns and thus makes an important contribution to the optimization of cooling concepts in PEM electrolysers.

We would like to congratulate Oliver Kupfer and thank him for his contribution to the optimization of energy-efficient hydrogen technologies - an important step in the context of the energy transition.