Hydrolysis Mechanism of Bismuth in Chlorine Salt System Calculated by Density Functional Method

Based on the density functional theory, this paper presents the calculated cellular electronic properties of BiCl3, BiOCl and Bi3O4Cl, including unit cell energy, band structure, total density of states, partial density of states, Mulliken population, overlapping population, etc. Combined with the thermodynamic analysis of Bi3+ hydrolysis process in chlorine salt system, the conversion mechanism of oxychloride bond in BiCl3 to form BiOCl and Bi3O4Cl by hydrolysis, ethanololysis and ethylene glycol alcohololysis was obtained by infrared spectroscopy. The results indicate that the energy of Bi3O4Cl cell system was lower than that of BiOCl cell, indicating that the structure of Bi3O4Cl was more stable. From the analysis of bond fluctuation, the electron nonlocality in BiOCl belt was relatively large, and the orbital expansibility was strong; thus the structure of BiOCl was relatively active. The state density map of Bi3O4Cl had the widest energy gap, i.e., the covalent bond between Bi3O4Cl was stronger than BiOCl. Therefore, the hydrolysis of BiCl3 would preferentially generate Bi3O4Cl with a more stable structure. The number of charge arrangement, overlapping population and infrared spectrogram indicate that there were two basic ways in the hydrolysis and alcoholysis of BiCl3. Firstly, two chlorine atoms in BiCl3 were replaced by hydroxyl groups ionized by water and alcohol to form [Bi(OH)2Cl] monomer, and BiOCl and Bi3O4Cl were formed by intra-molecular dehydration or inter-molecular dehydration. The other way was that the Bi atom directly reacted with the OH ionized by water and alcohol to form the [Bi-OH] monomer, and the Cl atom replaced the H atom on the hydroxyl group in the [Bi-OH] monomer to further form BiOCl and Bi3O4Cl.