In the study, the effect of mass transfer and concentration polarization was ignored to simplify the constructed mathematical model and focus on the contradictory effect of charge transport and fluid flow. We believe that adding the mass transport phenomena via Nernst-Planck equation would change the direction of the formed ionic channels, making them bend towards the flow direction. This effect can be observed in the work of Beck et al. , where the mass transport has been included in the model. In the current model, the charge and flow problems do not have any interaction, so the ionic pathways emerged independent from the flow direction. However, comparing the obtained electrical and flow losses with the results of Beck et al. shows comparable patterns. In both studies, the power loss due to the internal electrical resistance is higher than the pumping power loss by one order of magnitude. Another similarity to the Beck et al. work is related to the formation of the internal pathways in the vicinity of the membrane rather than the current collector, facilitating the increase in the ionic current close to the membrane. Fig. shows the simulated dimensionless current density (Eq. 30), ionic potential (Eq. 28), and velocity profiles of the fluid flow (Eq. 31) in the optimized designs of the runs depicted in Fig. . Having a higher liquid/solid conductivity ratio while keeping the ratio of the ohmic to kinetic losses equal to one (δ = 1) in run (A) resulted in higher current densities and ionic potential. Pressure drops are plotted in Fig. in the supplementary material of the paper, showing that both cases feature a similar profile (∼ 2900 non-dimensional pressure). Considering that the flow objective loss in this work is the energy dissipation, having a similar normalized flow loss improvement (93.5%, also as depicted in Fig. ) demonstrates that the chosen objective function is equivalent to the pressure drop metric commonly used in similar studies .