Porous structures of the graphitic cathode materials for aluminum reduction and its correlation to graphitization degree

• 1、School of Metallurgical and Ecological Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing

Abstract： Conventional methods analysing porous structures of the graphitic cathode materials for aluminum reduction cells are difficult to perform a fast quantitative analysis to a large amount of cathode samples with varying degree in graphitization. On the basis of stereoscopy, the two-dimensional parameters were defined for the porous structure characterization. Image analysis method has been applied to analysis the porous structures with different graphitization degree. The porous structure parameters (porosity, pore diameter, aspect ratio, specific surface area, orientation and connectivity) were statistically calculated. The results demonstrate that the image analysis method can be used for characterizing porous structures of graphitic cathode quantificationally, which can be again related to the graphitization degree. The information obtained could be useful for improving the quality and performance of the graphite cathodes.

Keywords： nonferrous metallurgy porous structure pore size distribution connectivity graphitic cathode aluminum electrolysis