Density Functional Theoretical Study on Dehydration Process of MgCl<sub>2</sub>·6H<sub>2</sub>O

Anhydrous magnesium chloride (MgCl2), the dehydration product from bischofite (MgCl2•6H2O) and as industrial raw material for preparation of electrolytic magnesium, is now the most advanced and perfect technological process. For long, the detailed dehydration process was not known due to its dehydration complexity and lack of appropriate experimental conditions. In this paper, quantum chemistry method based on density functional theory (DFT) was used to study the whole dehydration processes. The molecular geometries of MgCl2•6H2O, MgCl2•4H2O, MgCl2 •2H2O, MgCl2•H2O and MgCl2 were all optimized at level of B3LYP/6-31G*, the optimized geometrical parameters and correspondent energies corrected by the second order Møller-Plesset perturbation theory (MP2) were thus obtained. Results show that the energy variations corresponding to the whole dehydration steps from MgCl2•6H2O via intermediates MgCl2•4H2O, MgCl2•2H2O and MgCl2•H2O, to anhydrous product MgCl2 are 35.55, 41.30, 28.55, 31.08kcal/mol, respectively. For steps of 2H2O removal, the energy variation from MgCl2•2H2O to MgCl2 is 59.63kcal/mol, bigger than the steps from MgCl2•6H2O to MgCl2•4H2O (35.55kcal/mol) and from MgCl2•4H2O to MgCl2•2H2O (41.30kcal/mol), which means the last two water molecules are the most difficult to be removed. All these results are significant for mechanism study of bischofite dehydration and are helpful for industrial production of anhydrous magnesium chloride.