Experimental Validation of a Computational Fluid Dynamics Model of Copper Electrowinning

Abstract

The hydrodynamics that occur in the space between the electrode plates in copper electrowinning (EW) are simulated using a computational fluid dynamics model (CFD). The model solves for the phases of gas oxygen bubbles and electrolyte using the Navier-Stokes equations in a CFD framework. An oxygen source is added to the anode, which sets up a recirculation pattern. The gradients in copper near the cathode lead to buoyancy forces, which result in an uplift in the electrolyte close to the cathode. This study investigates the experimental validation of the CFD model using a small/medium-scale real EW system. The predicted fluid velocity profiles are compared with the experimental values, which have been measured along various cross sections of the gap between the anode and the cathode. The results show that the CFD model accurately predicts the velocity profile at several heights in the plate pair. The CFD model prediction of the gas hold-up and the recirculation pattern is compared with visualizations from the experiment. The CFD model prediction is shown to be good across several different operating conditions and geometries, showing that the fundamental underlying equations used in the CFD model transfer to these cases without adjusting the model parameters.

Editors' Choice—Modeling and Validation of Local Electrowinning Electrode Current Density Using Two Phase Flow and Nernst–Planck Equations

“…4 The fluid flow equations used are of a Lagrangian nature with a force coupling term added to the base Navier-Stokes equation to produce the effect of bubbles. Leahy et al 5 provides an excellent comparison of an electrowinning model to previous work. Convection and diffusion are modeled, but the effects of gas conductivity on the electrolyte are not considered.…”

“…The cathodic transport is handled based on the current density and transference number and Faraday expressions are used for anodic and cathodic generation. Thus the work commenced 5 is enhanced by a change in the turbulence model and the incorporation copper transport utilizing the Schmidt number. Attention is paid to the transient nature of the fluid flow.…”

Hydrodynamic Simulation of Two-Phase Flow in an Industrial Electrowinning Cell with New Scheme

“…The cell consisted of an anode and a cathode with inlet and outlet. Leahy and Schwarz (2010), with a two-dimensional fluid simulation of the velocity field, obtained a 20% error for the Filzwieser's experimental cell. Their article was one of the first papers to simulate an electrowinning cell.…”

Entropy and Hurst analysis for the determination of two-phase flow time series complexity

“…(Cisternas, et al, 2019;Gao and Herbst, 2009). However, the approach for the use of CFD in minerals processing, has been focused on optimizing process, enhancing physical parameters, and validating experimental lab results for some specific systems such as flotation cells (Koh and Schwarz, 2007;Schwarz et al, 2016;Sarhan et al, 2018), hydrocyclones (Rama Murthy and Udaya Bhaskar, 2012;Olson and Van Ommen, 2004;Safa et al, 2014), thickeners (Fawell et al, 2019), electrowinning cells (Mahjabin Najminoori et al, 2015;Leahy and Schwarz, 2010) and heap leaching (Bennett et al, 2012). These works do not present a general application, since the proposed mathematical model depends on the physical and chemical phenomena of the system involved.…”