Sustainable Mining and Metallurgy

Anode guide rod group is an important conductive component in electrolytic aluminum production. Its conductivity and service life are important indicators to measure economic benefits. In order to solve the problem of quality instability in conventional welding, this paper analyzed the disadvantages of current automatic welding, and proposed a structural energy-saving anode guide rod group robot welding scheme. The groove cutting, positioning and clamping, visual inspection and welding process of the anode guide rod group were reformed in an all-round way. The welding processes such as bidirectional double bead surfacing of anode steel claw and direct welding of anode guide rod steel-aluminum were used and improved to solve the problems of welding cracking, damage and high pressure drop. The production practice shows that the pressure drop of the structural anode steel claw is significantly lower than that of the cast steel claw. Compared with the traditional cast steel explosive welding block, the weld pressure drop of the steel-aluminum direct welding guide rod group can be reduced by 13.84mV, and the pressure drop fluctuation is small, stable below 20mV, and the conductivity is significantly improved. Using steel-aluminum direct welding, with 92.5% current efficiency calculation, per ton of aluminum can save electricity by about 44.6kW·h, and the energy saving effect is obvious.