Improvement of smelting energy efficiency through anode production improvement

本项目旨在优化阳极制造工艺，解决阳极制造过程中的能耗和电解槽性能对阳极质量的影响。目前的阳极技术面临的挑战是在处理来料的频繁变化和限制用于阳极焙烧的燃料数量的同时，生产出稳定的高质量阳极。低质量阳极遇到的问题是阳极解体和彻底失效，这不仅导致阳极生产所需能量的损失，而且还会导致电流和磁场的扰动，增加额外的功率消耗。仅在魁北克省，每年就有21.6万吨碳被过量消耗。在现代冶炼计划中，显着降低电解槽的碳耗是不可能的，而实施惰性阳极的前景也不明朗。随着时间的推移，提高阳极质量和生产工艺很可能是合理降低超额碳耗的唯一途径。

This project is planned to optimize the anode manufacturing technology addressing the challenges related to the effect of anode quality of both the energy consumption in anode manufacturing process and the performance of smelting cells. The challenge of the present anode technology is to produce consistently high quality anodes while dealing with frequent changes in the incoming raw materials and limiting the amount of fuel used for anode baking. The issues encountered with low quality anodes are anode disintegration and outright failure resulting not only in the loss of the energy required for the anode production, but also in the perturbation of the current flow and magnetic field increasing the extra power consumption. 216,000 tons of carbon is annually consumed in excess, in Québec alone. In the modern smelting plans a significant reduction of carbon consumption in electrolytic bath is not possible while the perspective for implementation of inert anodes is not clear either. In time, the improvement of anode quality and production process is most likely the only way to reasonably reduce the excess carbon consumption.