China Nonferrous Metallurgy

Aiming at the unreasonable distribution of electric heating field caused by the deformation of anode after consumption and the excessive current density at the bottom of cathode rod in rare earth electrolytic cell, taking an 8kA rare earth electrolytic cell of an enterprise as the research object, the three-dimensional electric heating field simulation was carried out by using COMSOL multi-physical field coupling software to optimize the model of anode inclination and cathode structure simultaneously. The electric field distribution of electrolytic cell was obtained and analyzed. The results show that the current density at the bottom of the cathode rod decreases and the electric field distribution in the bottom half of the electrolytic cell is more uniform after the cathode is optimized into a hemispherical shape, which improves the local overheating of the electrolytic cell. When the anode dip Angle increases, the voltage in the tank decreases, and the high temperature area shifts to the bottom of the tank. The distribution of electric heating field is the most reasonable when the anode half-dip Angle and insertion depth are 8° and 320mm.