Electrochemical Hydrodynamics Modeling Approach for a Copper Electrowinning Cell

Abstract

This study demonstrates a simulation based on a full coupling of electrochemical kinetics with the 3-dimensional transport of ionic species in a flowing electrolyte through a simplified channel cell of copper electrowinning. The dependences of ionic electro-transport on the velocity of a stationary electrolyte flow were studied using a coupling approach of the electrochemical reaction model. The present model was implemented in a commercially available computational fluid dynamics (CFD) platform, Ansys-CFX, using its customization ability through user-defined functions. The main parameters characterizing the effect of the turbulent flow of an electrolyte between two planar electrodes were demonstrated by means of a CFD-based multiphysics simulation approach. Simulation was carried out for the case of the mass transport controlled copper electrowinning characteristics in a stream of acid sulfate electrolyte. This approach was taken into account in the concentration profile at the electrode surface, to represent the variation of the convective diffusion limited current density as a function of the flow characteristics and of the applied current density. It was able to predict a conventional current-voltage relation in addition to details of the electrolyte fluid dynamics and electrochemical variable, such as the flow field, species concentrations, potential, and current distributions throughout the galvanostatic cell.