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Modified Industrial Chlor Alkali Process for Reduction in Power Consumption

Abhishek Sinha, Anurag Ranjak

Chlor-alkali process, being the second most widely used process, has a very high value of power consumption all over the world. In these experiments, we tried to relate this value of power consumption to some of the Donnan potential and process conditions, and tried to capture the impact of varying these parameters, like temperature difference across the electrolytes, concentration of the electrolytes and tried to reduce this value of power consumption. Finally, we also applied di-electrophoresis over the electrodes, so as to enhance the surface area for ion transfer, resulting in decreased resistance. A total of 4 sets of experiments, with multiple runs, were performed to capture this behavior and it was found that the outcome was optimum when the temperature of NaCl side was 5 K more than the other chamber, with the value of Donnan potential being reduced significantly. Also, the Donnan potential was minimum when NaCl concentration was 4 M. Di-electrophoresis produced optimum results for frequencies 50 Hz and 100 Hz. After all these, a combined experiment, with optimized process conditions and di-electrophoresis, was performed and the obtained result proved that the final Donnan potential value was actually around 12% less than that for a normal chlor-alkali process at lab scale, hence implying significant reduction in power consumption. This significant reduction in power consumption can have some serious economic impact on this process being carried out at large-scale.