Thomas F. O’Brien

Chemical Engineering Principles

The purpose of this chapter is to gather in one place some of the basic considerations that apply to the engineering techniques and unit operations that are important in the chloralkali process. Thus, the chapter begins with a discussion of material and energy balances (Section 10.2). These are basic to all of chemical engineering and are used implicitly throughout this book. Here, we present some of the fundamentals. Section 10.3 then covers current distribution. This is uniquely important in electrochemical processing. The presentation discusses methods of predicting and determining the distribution of current in electrochemical reactors of different kinds.

Overview of the Chlor-Alkali Industry

The world production capacity of chlorine reached 53 million tons in 2002 from approximately 22 million tons in 1970 [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] and is expected to increase to 65 million tons by the year 2015 [8]. In this chapter, the major manufacturing processes and the factors affecting the growth pattern of the chlor-alkali industry are presented.

History of the Chlor-Alkali Industry

During the last half of the 19th century, chlorine, used almost exclusively in the textile and paper industry, was made [1] by reacting manganese dioxide with hydrochloric acid

Brine Preparation and Treatment

MnO_2 + 4HCl\xrightarrow{{100 - 110^\circ C}}MnCl_2 + Cl_2 + 2H_2 O

Cell-Room Design

(1)

Plant Commissioning and Operation

Thermodynamics is a powerful tool for the study of chemical reactions and is intimately related to the atomic and molecular description of the species participating in these reactions. The transformation of energy involved in the reactions depends on the thermodynamic conditions of the reaction, and can be expressed in terms of various thermodynamic functions. One such function is the Gibbs free energy [1, 2, 3, 4], expressed by Eq.(l):

Chlor-Alkali Technologies

G = H - TS