Electrochemical Hydrodynamics Modeling Approach for a Copper Electrowinning Cell

This study demonstrates a simulation based on a full coupling of electrochemical kinetics with the three-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 took into account 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.