ION TRANSPORT MODELING OF REALISTIC THIN_LAYER CELL CONFIGURATIONS

G. MARSHALL, S. DENGRA, E. ARIAS, F. V. MOLINA, G. GONZÁLEZ , M. VALLIERESC

Washington

Congreso; 199th Meeting of The Electrochemical Society; 2001

The Electrochemical Society

ABSTRACT  We present computer simulations of ion transport in electrochemical deposition (ECD) in thin_layer cells for highly diluted solutions and  realistic cell geometry configurations, under gravitoconvection prevailing regimes. The computational model solves the Nernst_Planck equations for ion transport, the Poisson equation for the electrostatic potential and the Navier_Stokes equations for the fluid motion in a lattice with a length to width ratio of more than one order of magnitude. The equations are written in terms of a set of dimensionless numbers among which stands the Gravity Grashof number describing gravitoconvection prevailing regimes. Due to the extreme disparity of the physical scales and geometry distortion of the electrochemical process, we introduced in  the computational model a domain decomposition technique with a strongly implicit iterative method and its implementation on a parallel machine consisting in a cluster of  PC’s under MPI and Linux. This allows the utilization of very fine grids in highly distorted domains with more realistic Gravity Grashof numbers, and results in a robust algorithm for highly diluted solutions close to those found in experiments. The computer simulations predict full front interaction, vortex generation and merging and a space_time fronts evolution with a correct time scaling.