(583fc) Studies On Fluidized Chlorination Process of Alumina for Preparation of Anhydrous Aluninum Chloride

Studies on fluidized chlorination process of alumina for preparing anhydrous aluninum chloride from alumina

Junling Zhang, Jie Gao, Shimou Chen, Yongquan Zhou, Suojiang Zhang*

^aInstitute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences,100190, Beijing, PR China

*Corresponding author: sjzhang@home.ipe.ac.cn

The potential advantages of utilizing aluminum chloride as a source material in the electrolytic production of aluminum have long been recognized, but there is still no comercial art both to provide aluminum chloride of sufficiently high purity as to be utilizable therein and to provide aluminum chloride with significant required quantity in an economically acceptable manner so far. It has reported that aluminum chloride can be made from carbon, alumina and chlorine on a large scale at relatively low cost. But the production is fraught with many technical difficulties, such as lower utilization rate of raw material and products capture rate. Herein, comercial alumina and petroleum coke were used in a fluidized bed to prepare the anhydrous alumimum chloride. Various parameters influnced on the reaction were investigated systematically including reaction temperature, reaction time, particle size, chlorine gas flow rate and coal/alumina ratio by single-factor experiments. The results showed that at appropriate conditions of fluidized bed chlorination process chlorination rate of alumina could reach over 90% and the space-time yield is higher than 300 kg/(m³·h). The study on chlorination kinetics of alumina in fluidized bed indicates that the process conforms to the contracting unreduced nucleus model without solid products. Within the temperature range from 750 °C to 900 °C, the reaction is controlled by diffusion, so the effective way to improve the reaction efficiency is intensifying the mass transfer and enlarging the effective reaction surface.

Keywords: alumina, petroleum coke, fluidized bed, chlorination, kinetics

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by National Science Fund of China (51104140, 21276257).