Calculation Of Thermal-Electric Field In 300KA Prebaked Anode Aluminum Reduction Cell

In the modern production of aluminum industry,aluminum reduction cell is the main equipment.There are a few kinds of physical fields in the cell, including electric field, thermalfield, magnetic field, stress field, flow field and so on.Each of these physical fields is not independent of each other, but interactional. Each physical field will have a large or small effect on other physical fields and the relationship is very complex. The thermal-electric field is the basis of other physical fields, and it has a direct impact on aluminum production, including horizontal current, thermal-electric balance,groove chamber shape, aluminum liquid interface,and then it will have impact on current efficiency,power consumption per ton aluminum, life of the cell and the other economic and technical index.In the study of thermal-electric field, direct measurement of some parameters is difficult and needs huge work and only some key parts can be measured. In this paper numerical simulation method is used to simulate the thermal-electric field to realize the optimization production.In this paper, the thermal-electric model is established based on the cell data of a 300 KA large pre-baked anode aluminum reduction cell using FEM Analysis Software of COMSOL Multiphysics. And in the simulation, take the whole 1/4 cell cutting along long and short axis symmetrical surface as the research object.The thermal-electric field of aluminum reduction cell will be counted a steady-state field andsolve coupling Laplace equation and Poisson equation.In this paper, the voltage distribution and temperature distribution of the aluminum reduction cell are calculated in the stable production process of the cell and discuss its rationality. Then the thermal field of the cell is calculated according to replacing the anode and changing the thickness of insulating material of anode. When the thickness of insulation material is reduced from 160mm to 40mm,the maximum temperature of the cell remained unchanged and the lowest temperature decreased from 128 to 79degrees Celsius. Effect of temperature of new anode on the cell shows that if the temperature of new anode is higher, the minimum temperature of the cell and the ambient temperature is much higher. Then the change of temperature of new anode is calculated transiently. The result shows that the anode is heated through heat transportation. All the results will provide guidelines for aluminum production.