Experimental study of thermodynamic properties and phase equilibria in Na2CO3–K2CO3 system

Abstract

Sodium and potassium carbonates and their mixtures are important for different applications, e.g. for latent thermal energy storage, die-casting processes and molten carbonate fuel cells. In this work the phase diagram and thermodynamic properties of Na2CO3–K2CO3 system were studied by differential thermal analysis, differential scanning calorimetry and high temperature X-ray diffraction. Three carbonate mixtures (56, 25 and 75 mol% of Na2CO3) have solid-solid transition in a wide temperature range between 648 K and 823 K. The high temperature XRD analysis has shown that this transition is a continuous process of changing of the unit cell volume without structural changing of the hexagonal lattice. This phenomenon has also been observed on the measured heat capacity curves. The obtained experimental results were compared with calculations performed using the previous thermodynamic datasets. The comparison of these results shows that further thermochemical assessment of this system needs to be performed to achieve better agreement with the available experimental data.