Modeling the electric field and potential of an electrowinning cell with bipolar floating electrodes

An electric model for electrolysis cells used in copper electrowinning processes is developed. It is applied to the analysis of cells, using series configurations of bipolar floating electrodes. This technology has been used in several fields of electrochemistry, but has not yet been applied by the copper industry. Its main advantage is that, for the same copper production, the cell requires a much lower DC current, as compared to conventional electrolysis cells, which use a parallel configuration of unipolar electrodes. This feature allows it to be supplied from a modular and compact PWM rectifier instead of a bulk and high current thyristor rectifier. Finite difference algorithms in two dimensions are derived to obtain the graphical distribution of the potential and the electric field inside the cell, and around the bipolar electrodes. The proposed modeling algorithms are implemented in the MATLAB software package. Different geometrical distributions of the floating electrodes in the cell are analyzed