A copper electrolysis cell model including effects of the ohmic potential loss in the cell

A computational model of a Cu electrolysis cell is presented. The model includes the microscopic mass transfer and electric field effects, as well as the effects of the ohmic loss of potential in the cell bulk electrolyte. A lumped (0D) estimate for the cell ohmic loss is created by utilizing a 3D electric fieldmodel of the cell and the LambertW-function is applied to include the effects of ohmic loss to the cellmodel. The model structure enables computing the cell current, the electrode overpotentials and the cell ohmic loss, with the only model input variable being the cell voltage. The cell model is implemented as a coupled 0D+ 2D computational model, which is solved with the finite elements method. Cyclic voltammetry (CV) is conducted in an electrolysis cell, whose dimensions can be accurately adjusted and measured. The electrode equation parameters are found by fitting themodel against the data of one CV experiment, after which the model is evaluated against three other measurements. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.