Performing MHD cell stability sensitivity analysis using MHD-Valdis

摘要

When designing aluminium reduction cell technology or retrofitting an existing one, there are two critical cell design aspects that must be addreBed. One of them is the cell energy balance, the second one is the Magneto-Hydro-Dynamic or MHD cell stability. The second aspect is simpler than it looks: one wants the cell to be a very bad resonator of perturbations; when you bang it, you want the resonating noise to die quickly. The physics of that MHD noise resonance in an aluminium reduction cell is now well understood and can be reproduced numerically in mathematical models that can then be used as design tools. MHD-Valdis is such a mathematical model. It is commercially available to the whole aluminium industry, to be used as an efficient cell design tool for improving the cell busbar design in particular. The article below presents key aspects of the behaviour of the MHD-Valdis code to demonstrate its ability to reproduce the MHD behaviour of an aluminium reduction cell.