Modeling and analysis of a molten salt electrowinning system with liquid cadmium cathode

In the present work, an electrowinning process in the LiCl-KCl/Cd system is considered to model and analyze the equilibrium behavior and electro-transport of the actinide and rare-earth elements. Equilibrium distributions of the actinide and rare-earth elements in a molten salt and liquid cadmium system have been estimated for an infinite potentiostatic electrolysis from the thermodynamic data and material balance. A simple dynamic modeling of this process was performed by taking into account the material balances and diffusion-controlled electrochemical reactions in a diffusion layer at an electrode interface between the molten salt and liquid cadmium cathode. This model demonstrated a prediction of the concentration behaviors, a faradic current of each element and an electrochemical potential as function of the time up to the corresponding electro-transport satisfying a given applied current based on a galvano-static electrolysis. (authors)