Molten-salt Electrolytic Preparation Of High Purity Sodium Based On Sodium β-Alumina

Sodium metal as the alkali metal elements, since it has small density, low melting point, high boiling point, active chemical property, has become a widely chemical resource used in the development of national economy. With the development of China’s fourth generation nuclear reactor and the rise of new industries and new materials research and development and application, growing demand for high purity metallic sodium leads to a price no city. Molten salt electrolysis of sodium technology from the United States and France is the world leading level, but the related process conditions are shrouded in secrecy. Because of the sodium industry started late in our country and the poor foundation, the technology of producting sodium is relatively backward in China. The backward sodium process restricts the further development of the sodium industry and related industries in China. Though great progress has been made in sodium industry, gap is still very large compared to the world’s advanced manufacturing technology. So researching the advanced manufacturing technology in Sodium electrolytic cells is helpful to improve the technology of sodium production and promote the sustainable development of economy.Preparation of sodium metal production technology mainly contains molten caustic soda electrolysis and molten salt electrolysis method. The purity of sodium prepared by those methods is not high, which could be for the use of related industries after purifying. Those purification systems, such as cold trap method filtering method and distillation, have many disadvantages and the purity of production is less than satisfactory. Therefore, seeking a process method which is sample and has high purity sodium is necessary. Sodium β-Alumina as a new solid electrolyte material is developing fast in recent decades, whose characteristic is that sodium ions can migrate in freely and other ions are unable or difficult to pass under the effect of electric field. This experiment split anodic electrolyte and cathode liquid sodium by Sodium β-Alumina tube as the diaphragm in order to provide a reasonable experimental data for optimizing sodium electrolytic tank.The details are summarized as follows:1. To design and write processes operating manual based on sodium electrolytic tank parameters.2. To feedback experiment equipment optimization suggestions based on the record and analysis of the problems in the experiment. The results show that the experiment device 2 has solved the requirement for high sealing technology by optimizing the device 1. According to the experiments, it is found that the device 2 also has some disadvantages, such as the sodium liquid is difficult to smooth out in the experiment and the device is not easy to remove after the experiment has ended, further more, sodium metal is not easy to take out from the sodium storing device. So the device 3 is designed to solve the above-mentioned issues.3. Experimental results and analysisThis experiment split anodic electrolyte and cathode liquid sodium by Sodium P-Alumina tube as the diaphragm, whose device structure is simple and technological process is simple without side effects and current efficiency is close to 100%. The metal sodium can reach more than 99.63% purity.