As shown in Fig. -A, the energy dissipation loss for the flow gets minimized rapidly on the first iterations, decreasing the total normalized loss while causing the electrical loss to increase above 1, representing a performance decrease. After reaching a minimum value at around iteration 5, the electrical loss starts to get reduced and falls below 1, causing a slight increment in the flow objective function. In the run with lower liquid/solid conductivity ratio shown in Fig. , the flow objective function competes with the electrical loss from the beginning, leading to the oscillation observed in both curves. The flow loss gets to the minimum at around iteration 15, where the pathway is formed in the middle of the electrode. The formation of the flow pathway prevents the electrical loss optimization from performing well, resulting in a normalized electrical loss bigger than 1 demonstrating that the efficiency of the electrode has decreased from the ohmic loss perspective.