Abstract
The quality of coke materials available for anodes for the aluminium industry is changing and industrial cokes with higher impurity levels are now introduced. The cokes in the anodes must meet specifications with respect to impurity levels to ensure proper operation in the electrolysis cells, and a desired quality of the aluminium metal. The presence of sulfur has been observed to reduce the CO2 reactivity and a certain level of sulfur is therefore targeted in the anodes. In this work, the significance of varying sulfur and metal impurity content in industrial cokes were evaluated with respect to CO2 reactivity, accessible surface area, pore size distribution , surface oxide groups and crystallite reactive edge planes. While relatively similar cokes are observed to give a lower reactivity with increasing sulfur content, cokes that have distinct differences in surface properties can have dissimilar reactivity despite identical sulfur content. Correlations between pore size distribution and presence of S-S bound sulfur , possibly condensed Sx, was also observed.
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Acknowledgements
Financial support from the Norwegian Research Council and the partners Hydro Aluminium, Alcoa, Elkem Carbon and Skamol through the project “Reactivity of Carbon and Refractory Materials used in Metal Production Technology” (CaRMa) is acknowledged. Technical support from Anne Støre and Jannicke Kvello, SINTEF Industry, is also acknowledged.
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Jahrsengene, G., Rørvik, S., Ratvik, A.P., Lossius, L.P., Haverkamp, R.G., Svensson, A.M. (2019). Reactivity of Coke in Relation to Sulfur Level and Microstructure. In: Chesonis, C. (eds) Light Metals 2019. The Minerals, Metals & Materials Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05864-7_153
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05864-7_153
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