Abstract: The energy consumption is very huge in metallurgical industry,and the rare earth smelting process has the same characteristic.When smelting rare earth metals by molten salt electrolysis,a large amounts of heat is released from the side wall and the upper surface of the smelting electrolyzer,producing some acid gas during the smelting process together. In the process of rare earth smelting,a large amount of waste heat is lost in the electrolytic cell by means of radiation and convection heat transfer. A rare earth smelting simulation experimental cell was built,and a similar temperature field in the cell was obtained by using coal-fired heat release. The cooling water was used to conduct convection heat transfer with the side wall of the simulated electrolytic cell and radiation heat transfer with the high temperature radiation surface of the simulated electrolytic cell. The experimental study on heat transfer of tank wall and top radiation in rare earth smelting process was carried out. The results show that the heat transfer rate in the side wall increases with the increase of the mass flow rate of cooling water and the influence of water flow rate on the heat transfer of tank wall is stronger than that of the distance between the radiant heating surface and the top surface of the simulated tank. In the experiments,when the distance between the radiation absorbing surface and the upper surface of the simulated electrolyzer is 0.2 m and the mass flow rate of the cooling water is 0.285 kg/s,the maximum heat transfer rate in the side wall is 2.256 kW. The capacity of the recovered radiation heat is greatly affected by the distance from the radiant absorbing surface and the top of the smelting groove and increases with decreasing the distance. With the distance of 0. 1 m and the mass flow rate of 0.292 kg/s,the recovered radiation heat reaches up to 19.541 kW and the total heat transfer rate is 21.114 kW. Based on the experimental data,the practical capacity of the recovered radiation heat and total heat deduced are 52.796 kW and 83.237 kW. The total heat recovered accounts for 55.5% of the total electricity consumption of the smelting process. The above results can be used to supply reference for developing energy saving technology and realizing reasonable utilization in rare earth smelting plant.