Effects of Pulse-Reverse Current on Purity of Deposit in Electrowinning of Cobalt

摘要

In order to improve the purity on deposit in cobalt electrowining, a fundamental study using Pulse-Reverse Current (PRC) was carried out. Based on a sulfate solution, Cu, Ni, and Fe as impurities were added during cobalt electrowinning. There were four reverse waveforms and frequency conditions from 1 Hz to 10 kHz, and the purity of each condition was compared with the Direct Current (DC) purity. From the results, it was found that the anodic potential induced by reverse current affects selective dissolution of impurities. In this work, the case of the highest reverse peak current density (I_r) with a short reverse time (t_r) at 100 Hz showed a higher purity than that of the DC. This PRC condition also showed only a 4% low current efficiency comparable to the DC. We concluded that an optimized PRC for cobalt electrowinning could improve the purity with little loss of current efficiency.