Hydrodynamical Simulation of Perspective Installations for Electrometallurgy of Aluminium

Electrometallurgy is based on the electrolysis of fused chemical compounds of the metals. The process of electrolysis is not a simple chemical reaction of mix and match. As electricity is involved in this process, care is taken to understand and set up the apparatus as required. In view of this, basic requirements for theoretical, experimental understanding and following set up procedures are to be studied. The process inherent features, which define the hydrodynamics of the melt are:  high-strength electric current, which generates a large amount of Joule heat; spatial distribution of the volumetric power may be nonuniform  chemical reactions, which change the compound and generate a large amount of the gas bubbles; this may result in gradients of the melt density and current density  bubble rising, which strongly defines the velocities at the melt. The experimental explorations in the electrometallurgy are usually difficult or impossible because of the high temperature and hostile environment. For this reason electrometallurgical processes are the application field of CFD. The aim of this chapter  to demonstrate such application based on well developed and widely used methods of numerical analysis. The object of the development is an electrometallurgy of aluminium. The presented mathematical model of vertical electrode cell takes into account the electric field and current density, chemical composition, heating, natural convection, bubble flows. The integrated model of such kind may be used for the detailed 3D numerical simulations of the new installations.