SILVA, Tiago Marques da.
Abstract:
The soda chlorine plants form an important segment in modern industry.
In this segment, the mechanism used for generation of products is electrolysis.
This mechanism uses electricity as a source of energy, unfolding water
molecules and some salts in products such as chlorine, hydrogen and caustic
soda. To perform electrolysis on an industrial scale, the re are three commercially available technologies, they are: Mercury, diaphragm and membrane. Of these, the diaphragm technology plays an important role because, despite having lost ground in recent years to the membrane technology, still has the largest contribution in volume production. Understanding the physical and chemical characteristics of the
diaphragm is the great challenge of this technology , because it is the domain of
the diaphragm deposition technique and therefore th e prior knowledge of cell
operating characteristics. This work aimed to obtain a mathematical model, the synthetic diaphragm used in the chlorine-soda in Alagoas, from the concentration of
products which are, A, B and C. Through this work, it was also possible to
evaluate the behavior of the characteristics the physical diaphragm in response
to varying concentration of these components in the medium. For this evaluation, the technique used was based on an industrial planning called DOE - Design and experiment, where samples were prepared in different concentrations and evaluated the parameters that define the characteristics of the diaphragm, which are number of MacMullin, permeability and thickness. With these data using the modeling Van Zee (1984) it was possible to provide for some basic conditions diaphragm operation, such as current efficiency and the concentration of the alkali produced.
The model thus brought a great approximation of theexperimental data, bringing the correction coefficient for NMAC and β of 96.7% and 99.9% respectively.
