Chemical Engineering December 2014 - 20

Newsfront
(to be completed at the end of this
month), several milestones have
been achieved, says Chinbay Fan,
GTI's R&D director. Using a stack
of 3-5 cells with 100 cm2 area, a
Faradaic efficiency (current efficiency)
of 83% has been observed,
with production of up to 14 g/h of
Al powder of >98% purity. Negotiations
are now underway for Phase
II, which will aim to further optimize
the process and scale it up.
Meanwhile, Alcoa (Pittsburgh,
RS PM ad 010914_Layout 1 1/9/14 8:16 AM Page 1
Pa.; www.alcoa.com) is also developing
a new electrolytic cell to improve
the efficiency of aluminum production
with support from the ARPA-E
METALS program. The three-year
1970 Dodge Super Bee
project, which started last March,
aims to recover the large amounts of
waste heat lost in conventional cells
by improving electrode design and
integrating a heat exchanger into
the wall of a cell. Normally the electrodes
in Al smelters are horizontal.
Alcoa plans to angle its cathode,
which will have the effect of increasing
surface area of the cell and shortening
the distance between cathode
and anode. The cathode will also
be protected by highly conductive
and durable ceramic plates. These
changes will combine to increase the
output from a given cell and enable
reduced energy usage, says ARPA.
Alcoa's design also integrates a molten
glass or salt heat exchanger to
capture and reuse waste heat within
the cell walls when needed, and reduce
global peak energy demand.
Adoption of a new design could lead
to an energy reduction of 0.1 quad/
yr across the entire U.S. aluminum
industry, says ARPA. [A quad is a
unit of energy equal to 1015 (a shortscale
quadrillion) Btu. or 1.055 ×
1018 joules (1.055 exajoules or EJ) in
SI units.]
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20 ChemiCal engineering www.Chemengonline.Com DeCemBer 2014
Chlor-alkali
The energy-intensive chlor-alkali
sector continues the slow process
of replacing mercury-cells and
asbestos-based diaphragm cells to
membrane technology (Chem. Eng.,
February 2001, pp. 31-33). As a
result, chlor-alkali plants are not
only " greener, " they are consuming
less energy. For example, Ashta
Chemicals Inc. announced last June
that it selected Ineos Technologies'
(Rolle, Switzerland; www.ineos.com)
BiChlor bipolar electrolyzers to replace
mercury-cell technology that
has been operating since the 1960s
in Astabula, Ohio. By converting to
membrane cell technology, Ashta
Chemicals says it will reduce electricity
consumption by about 20%.
Meanwhile, adoption of possibly
the most significant breakthrough
in chlor-alkali technology
is slowly being realized. The socalled
oxygen-depolarized cathodes
(ODC) was developed by Bayer AG
(now Bayer MaterialScience; Leverkusen,
Germany; www.materi
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Chemical Engineering December 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Chemical Engineering December 2014
