Thermal and Transport Properties of Molten Chloride Salts with Polarization Effect on Microstructure

Molten chloride salt is recognized as a promising heat transfer and storage medium in concentrating solar power recent years, but there serious lack for thermal property data of molten salts. In this work, local structures properties salt—including NaCl, MgCl2, ZnCl2—were precisely simulated by Born–Mayer–Huggins (BMH) potential rigid ion model (RIM) polarizable (PIM). Compared with experimental data, distances between cations, densities, capacities slats calculated from PIM agree remarkably better than those RIM. The polarization effect brings an extra contribution to screen large repulsive Coulombic interaction cation–cation, then it makes shorter distance larger density lower capacity. For ZnCl2, simulation deviations cations are respectively 3.8%, 3.7%, 0.3%. capacity NaCl experiments only 0.6% 2.2%, MgCl2 ZnCl2 0.7–10.7%. As the temperature rises, increases structure turns into loose state, so conductivity decrease, while ionic self-diffusion coefficient increases, which also well results.