Thermo-electric design of a 400 kA cell using mathematical models: A tutorial

Abstract

This paper presents a typical application of thermo-electric mathematical models to produce a thermally balanced aluminum reduction cell lining design. The paper is structured as a tutorial, the selected example is a modern prebaked PBF cell running at 400 kA. The models used are the now standard steady state thermo-electric 3D full cell slice model and the lump parameters dynamic process model as well as the newly developed dynamic thermo-electric 2D+ full cell slice process model.