1. Proceedings
  2. I3M
  3. 2022
  4. EMSS
  5. 10.46354/i3m.2022.emss.017

Numerical modelling of aluminothermic reduction for low-carbon-footprint silicon production

  • a Sergey Semenov ,
  • b Raphaël Bayle,
  • c Patrick Namy
  • a,b,c  SIMTEC, 5 Rue Felix Poulat, Grenoble, 38000, France
Cite as
Semenov S., Bayle R., and Namy P. (2022).,Numerical modelling of aluminothermic reduction for low-carbon-footprint silicon production. Proceedings of the 34th European Modeling & Simulation Symposium (EMSS 2022). , 017 . DOI: https://doi.org/10.46354/i3m.2022.emss.017

Abstract

Silicon production usually employs carbon to reduce quartz. A new process using secondary aluminium instead of carbon, and, thus avoiding producing carbon dioxide, is currently being studied. Two immiscible phases are involved in the process, a metal phase, initially composed of aluminium, and a slag phase, initially composed of a mix of lime and quartz. Present numerical work studies different phenomena that contribute to the reaction kinetics, namely diffusion, soluto-gravitational convection and thermo-soluto-gravitational convection. The impact of forced convection on the global reaction rate is also studied. For this purpose, two numerical models, including chemical, thermal and fluid dynamics aspects, are developed: a model where the metal-slag interface is fixed and explicitly represented and a diffuse interface model. The models are numerically solved using the finite element method within the software COMSOL Multiphysics®. The proposed methodology is totally new due to modelling of all physical phenomena in a fully coupled way. The aim of this work is to gain insight into the phenomena contributing to the global reaction rate, which is a critical parameter to control in the silicon production process. The novelty of approach consists in assessing the impact of individual phenomena by incrementing progressively the complexity of models

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