Development of a standard bench-scale cell for electrochemical studies on inert anodes. Inert Anode/Cathode Program

Objective of this work was to develop a standard bench-scale cell for performing short-term ac and dc polarization studies on inert anode candidate materials in molten cryolite. Two designs for electrochemical cells were developed and successfully evaluated in short-term experiments. Both cells consisted on the inert anode as a small cylindrical specimen partially sheathed in alumina, an Al/Al/sub 2/O/sub 3/ reference electrode, and a cryolite bath saturated in alumina. The difference between the two cells was in the design of the cathode. One cell used a bare solid metal cathode; the other used an aluminum pad similar to the Hall-Heroult configuration