Electorefinery

Australia / South Australia / Port Augusta /
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This is the electrorefinery facility

In an electrorefining process, the anode is the impure metal and the impurities must be lost during the passage of the metal from the anode to the cathode during electrolysis, i.e. the electrode eactions are, at the anode:

M → Mn+ + neand
at the cathode:
Mn+ + ne- → M

Electrorefining is a much more common process than electrowinning and such plants occur throughout the world on scales between 1000-100,000 ton/year. Usually they are part of a larger operation to separate and recover pure metals from both scrap and primary ores. Therefore, the process must be designed to handle a variable-quality metal feed and lead to a concentration of all the metals present in a form which can be treated further. Electrorefining often provides a particularly high purity of metal.

Reference:

www.elmhurst.edu/~chm/vchembook/336electrorefine.html
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Coordinates:   30°26'51"S   136°51'52"E
This article was last modified 13 years ago