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3D and 2D experimental views on the flow field of gas-evolving electrode cold

model for electrolysis magnesium

Article  in  Flow Measurement and Instrumentation · July 2015

DOI: 10.1016/j.flowmeasinst.2015.07.011

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 Flow Measurement and Instrumentation 45 (2015) 415–420

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Flow Measurement and Instrumentation

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/flowmeasinst

Short communication

3D and 2D experimental views on the flow field of gas-evolving

electrode cold model for electrolysis magnesium
Chenglin Liu, Ze Sun n, Guimin Lu, Xingfu Song, Jianguo Yu
National Engineering Research Center for Integrated Utilization of Salt Lake Resource, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai 200237,
People's Republic of China

art ic l e i nf o a b s t r a c t

Article history: In the magnesium electrolysis process, chlorine gas bubbles release at the surfaces of anode and affect
Received 29 October 2013 electrolyte flow patterns. This paper presents an experimental apparatus to simulate the flow field in-
Received in revised form duced by chlorine gas evolution at the gas-evolving electrodes of magnesium electrolysis cell. The three-
25 June 2015
dimensional flow structures were determined by using volumetric three-component velocimetry (V3V)
Accepted 21 July 2015
technique, which has the ability to capture the out-of-plane velocity component. The three-dimensional
Available online 26 July 2015
flow structures in the region with a depth about 120 mm can be obtained. To achieve this, approximately
Keywords: 15,000 three-dimensional velocity vectors were detected in the flow measurements and constituted the
Gas-evolving electrodes three-dimensional flow field, which eliminated the perspective error caused by the out-of-plane motion
Particle image velocimetry
in Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) method. In experiments, comparisons are made between the V3V and
Three-dimensional measurement
PIV results. The in-of-plane velocities data obtained by V3V technique have the same trend with the PIV
Two-phase flow
Volumetric three-component velocimetry results, and V3V provides more details in the third direction for the flow field accurately.
& 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction investigate the flow structures and the hydrodynamic behaviors in

Magnesium electrolysis process is a commercial process for
producing magnesium. The electrolysis process is carried out in a
magnesium electrolysis cell that contains several vertical electro-
des immersed in the electrolyte [1]. High direct current is fed
between anodes and cathodes to cause electrochemical reaction of
the magnesium chloride reactant to magnesium. The system that
chlorine gas generated by reaction at the anode and induces the
electrolyte recirculation flow is a typical gas-evolving electrode
electrochemical cell. The motion of gas bubbles could significantly
affect the electrolyte flow field pattern and the performance of the
magnesium electrolytic process.
Gas-evolving electrodes exist in many electrochemical pro-
cesses, such as water electrolysis [2], fluorine production [3], and
many other chemical processes. A general description about the
gas-evolving vertical electrodes and the state of the art on mod-
eling these systems was given by Vogt [4]. The flow field induced
by the gas produced at electrodes is inherently unsteady in these
systems due to the strong coupling between the gas phase and
liquid phase. This leads to unsteady-state flow structures in the
liquid phase. Over the past decade, many experimental and nu-
merical simulation researches [5–11] have been performed to
n
Corresponding author. Fax: þ 86 21 64250981.
E-mail addresses: zsun@ecust.edu.cn (Z. Sun), jgyu@ecust.edu.cn (J. Yu).
the gas-evolving vertical electrodes system. Vogt and Alexiadis
[12–14] found that the flow structure of gas-evolving vertical
electrodes in the inter-electrode space is instable and complex.
However, almost all researches are based on the two-dimensional
flow experimental and simulation results.
Instantaneous measurement of three-dimensional velocity field
is essential for the analysis of fluid mechanics, since most flow
fields are intrinsically three-dimensional and therefore has three
velocity components. Conventional experimental observation
techniques, such as Pitot tubes, hot-wire anemometers, and laser
Doppler anemometry [15,16], have been widely used by previous
researchers. However, all these techniques have a common lim-
itation of only one-point measurement in the field at a time.
Classic particle image velocimetry (PIV) technique [17–19] typi-
cally uses a single camera to obtain two-components of fluid ve-
locity on a single plane. The out-of-plane velocity component in-
fluences the accuracy of measurement, because the information
describing the out-of-plane motions is embedded in the in-plane
motion [20]. Therefore, the desired measurement technique
should be able to capture 3D structures in order to have a com-
prehensive description on the 3D flow. Stereoscopic PIV [21,22]
uses two cameras to obtain three-components of fluid velocity on
a single plane, which is about 2 cm thick. Stereoscopic PIV requires
a level of optical access that can be difficult to obtain in some
experimental configurations. Holographic PIV [23] illuminates a
flow field seeded with particles and uses photographic films or

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.flowmeasinst.2015.07.011
0955-5986/& 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
416 C. Liu et al. / Flow Measurement and Instrumentation 45 (2015) 415–420
digital cameras as the recording medium to obtain three dimen-
sional displacements over a volume. The number of identified
vectors required to process films is severely limited. Tomographic
PIV [24,25] uses three or four cameras oriented at different angles
to collect the scattered light from the seed particles. Three-di-
mensional particle displacement field is obtained by reconstruct of
these particle distributions from the individual camera images.
Volumetric three-component velocimetry (V3V) [29,30], a no-
vel non-intrusive visualization experimental technique are used to
measure 3D flow in a volume up to 100 min depth with cross
sectional size of 120 mm by 120 mm instantaneously. The present
paper employs V3V method to examine the 3D flow structure in
an experimental apparatus, which could be used to represent the
gas-evolving vertical electrodes system in the magnesium elec-
trolysis cell. The objective of this work is to carry out a detailed
experimental investigation of the three-dimensional flow field
measurement by the V3V technique and then analyze the flow
structure and characteristics. The accuracy is assessed under the
same experimental conditions by the comparison of the in-of-
plane velocities with PIV.
2. Experimental details of V3V
2.1. Experimental apparatus
The experimental apparatus is a reduced scale representation
of the actual 120 kA magnesium electrolysis cell based on the
geometric similarity criteria. Experiments are conducted in a rec-
tangular glass tank of 185  200  100 mm3, which is filled with
water to a depth of 140 mm. Two organic glass plates are placed
vertically in two sides of the tank and a plastic plate is placed in
the center to represent the anode and cathode respectively. Upper
and lower edges of the cathode do not reach the surface of liquid
and the tank bottom. Two 110  100 mm2 porous glass plates with
the pore size of approximately 50 μm are embedded in the vertical
working area of the two anodes. Bubbles are generated on porous
glass plate surfaces with size in the range of 50 μm to 2 mm by
forcing the compressed air through the porous glass plates to
imitate the chlorine gas. The chlorine gas bubbles in real electro-
lytic conditions are larger than 1 mm [31,32]. There are nothing
released on the experimental cathode, because the effects of the
magnesium generated on the cathode can be neglected compared
with effects of chlorine gas in the actual electrolysis. The experi-
ments are carried out at room temperature (20 °C) with negligible
heat and mass transfer effects. The schematic diagram of experi-
mental apparatus of PIV and V3V is shown in Fig. 1.
Fig. 1. Schematic of the experimental apparatus: (a) PIV, (b) V3V.
2.2. V3V experiments
V3V camera probe (TSI Inc., USA) uses three digital CCD cam-
eras to view a flow field from three perspectives (top, left and
right), and each camera containing high-resolution 4 million pixels
(2048  2048). The probe is placed in front of the tank, and the
distance between camera and tank is approximately 700 mm.
Flow field is illuminated from the top with a double pulsed Nd:
YAG laser emitting light with wavelength of 532 nm and pulse
energy of 200 mJ (Continuum Inc., USA). The laser beam is spread
in x and z directions after passing through an optical arrangement
consisting of two negative 25 mm cylindrical lenses. Two beam
blocks are placed at the edge of the tank to limit the thickness of
light beam (100 mm) to illuminate the measurement volume only.
Water in the tank is seeded with polycrystalline tracer particles
with a mean diameter of approximately 50 mm. Laser sequencing
and V3V camera frames are triggered twice at a time interval of
2000 μs (Δt) by a Laser pulse 610035 synchronizer (TSI Inc., USA).
The displacement of particles in the time between the laser pulses
is recorded by capturing the image of particles in each pulse. The
3D particle tracking algorithm consists of three primary steps. The
first is recognizing the particle positions in the two-dimensional
space from each image captured by the three camera, followed
by determining the 3D locations of particles in space according
to the three perspectives from images, then tracking the particles
in the observation volume. In the observation volume (120 
120  100 mm3), the average number of independent particle-
tracked vectors was approximately 11,000.
A single V3V capture includes three image pairs with a sample
from the top digital CCD camera shown in Fig. 2. The locations of
tracer particles in each image are determined by setting a base
intensity threshold of 30. The particle density in Fig. 2 appears
very similar to that in a PIV image. But the volumetric particle
density for V3V is lower than that of PIV, because V3V image
covers a depth about 100 mm, while the PIV image typically cover
a thickness about 1 mm. In each experiment, at least 300 image
pairs are acquired and the velocity distribution is determined by
ensemble averaging the corresponding velocity maps. Image pro-
cessing process is performed by TSI Insight V3V 4G software. Since
bubbles are much bigger and brighter than the tracer particle, they
are often taken as the particles. However, the rising velocity of
bubbles with size of 1 mm is around 0.3 m s  1, [33] which is much
higher than the velocity of liquid. Therefore, a range filter is ap-
plied to the raw data to eliminate the bubbles vectors and obvious
spurious vectors. The range is set as 70.2 m s  1 for three-com-
ponent velocities.
 C. Liu et al. / Flow Measurement and Instrumentation 45 (2015) 415–420 417

Fig. 2. V3V image from the top camera.

Fig. 3. Isosurface of z component vorticity of 0.015 m s  1 with three-dimensional vectors of mean velocity field in the experimental cell. (For interpretation of the references
to color in this figure, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)
418 C. Liu et al. / Flow Measurement and Instrumentation 45 (2015) 415–420
3. Results and discussion
In the experimental cell, the velocity field is measured by V3V
with the gas flow rate of 1.0 L min  1 and 1.5 L min  1 to ensure the
escape velocity of the gas evolution on anode surface has the same
magnitudes as the real one. Instantaneous liquid velocity in three
orthogonal directions in the whole-field is detected simulta-
neously in this work. Meanwhile, the time-averaged flow field is
obtained based on 300 pairs of instant velocities, which are ob-
served to fluctuate from time to time. A typical single capture of
flow measurement yielded between 10,000 and 15,000 in-
dependent randomly three-dimensional spaced velocity vectors.
The isosurface of z component of vorticity and three-dimensional
velocity vectors of mean velocity are presented in Fig. 3. In this
plot, y-axis corresponds to the vertical axis and z-coordinate is the
distance from V3V camera to the experimental apparatus. The
velocity vectors are predominantly in the upward direction near
the anode due to drag forces, and then in the downward direction
near the cathode. In the vorticity isosurface plots, z vorticity is
represented with red (5.0 s  1) and blue (  5.0 s  1) colors. Two big
vortices (blue in Fig. 3) in the tank can be observed in the two
channels between the anode and cathode.
To evaluate the accuracy of V3V system and make a quantita-
tive comparison with 2D results, the velocity field of the experi-
mental apparatus is also measured by PIV. For PIV measurement,
V3V cameras are replaced by PIV camera and the light source is
changed into a light sheet of approximately 1 mm thickness while
the pulse energy is reduced to about 80 mJ. All the others char-
acteristics of the experimental device remains the same. The
profiles of time-averaged velocity components at two horizontal
Fig. 4. Time-averaged velocity along different lines for a gas rate of 1.0 L min  1.
lines, Y¼0.035 m and Y¼0.105 m in the center plane of the tank,
are plotted in Figs. 4 and 5. Velocities in Fig.4 are little lower than
that in Fig. 5 due to the different rate of gas flow. At Y¼0.105 m,
the profile of x-component of velocity at the left half is like a
positive hump and a negative hump formed at the right half. The
trend along Y ¼0.035 m is reversed and forms an s-sharp. The
profiles of y-component of velocities along the horizontal lines
have a good symmetrical shape with respect to the geometrical
plane of the tank. However, the velocity along Y¼0.035 mm is
little slower than that at Y ¼0.105 m. Experimental data near the
anode, however, normally has some errors in the precision due to
the effect of bubbles and the range filter.
According to Figs. 4 and 5, V3V results exhibits the same trend
with similar magnitudes and flow behavior as PIV results. How-
ever, some differences can also be found between these results,
especially for the velocity in the center. The effect of z-motion on
the flow pattern is highly associated with the magnitude of z-
component of velocity. Due to the instability of gas–liquid flow, the
z-component of liquid velocity is inevitable. All three velocity
components, including the out-of-plane velocity component, can
be accurately detected by V3V. Z-component of velocity in three
plane of Z ¼0.02 m, 0.04 m, and 0.06 m (the position are extracted
from V3V data) in the data volume are depicted in Fig. 6 to bring
out the key characteristics of the velocity distributions more
clearly. Z-component of velocity appears higher in the vicinity of
the anode and cathode (the green region and red region) than
other region. The position with high z-component velocity nor-
mally has larger experimental differences between V3V and PIV
results.
 C. Liu et al. / Flow Measurement and Instrumentation 45 (2015) 415–420 419

Fig. 5. Time-averaged velocity along different lines for a gas rate of 1.5 L min  1.

Fig. 6. Z-component of velocity vectors and contour of the liquid in the tank. (a) Z¼ 20 mm; (b) Z¼ 40 mm; (c) Z¼ 60 mm. (For interpretation of the references to color in this
figure, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

4. Conclusions the gas released at the gas-evolving electrodes was investigated

using V3V technique. Approximately 15,000 3D velocity vectors
The experimental apparatus scaled down from the actual were detected in the measurement results, which greatly increase
120 kA magnesium electrolysis cell was used to represent the gas- the understanding of the flow structure. Comparative analysis of
evolving vertical electrodes system. The 3D flow field generated by the x-component and y-component of velocities in V3V data with
420 C. Liu et al. / Flow Measurement and Instrumentation 45 (2015) 415–420
PIV results reveals that the V3V technique is reliable. V3V is not
only a set of velocity vector multi-plane obtained by PIV, but also
has the ability to accurately acquire the z-component of velocity
data in a three-dimensional space. V3V technique offers great
advantages to study highly complex three-dimensional flow
structures in the gas-evolving vertical electrodes system, which is
difficult to investigate by the using PIV data alone.
Acknowledgments
We acknowledge the financial support provided by the Na-
tional Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant 21206038), the
Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher
Education (New Teachers) (Grant 20120074120014), and the Fun-
damental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant
WB1414046).
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