Abstract:
© Copyright 2016 by The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society.An appropriate energy balance is critical to achieve high energy efficiency in aluminium electrolysis. However, to satisfy the electricity market, and the market demand for aluminium, a wider operational energy input window is now also required. Unfortunately this would require large scale adjustment of input power and heat dissipation, and is not possible with existing smelter technologies in which heat dissipations are not able to be adjusted widely or regulated. The associated wider cell operational window would also need to be matched to flexible energy supply without causing alumina concentration problems. Side ledge control is also a challenge under such a flexible energy input scenario, and the bath chemistry will be perturbed by dynamic ledge behaviour in conventional cryolitic baths. Thus, observations of the bath behaviour and heat transfer rates in the cell system are necessary in order to understand the limits of long term power adjustment. In this paper an analogue laboratory experiment is proposed, to model the industrial cell system and allow prediction of the effect of large scale power shifts.
