Lithium recovery from artificial brine using energy-efficient membrane distillation and nanofiltration
By S. H. Park, Ji-hoon Kim, Sun Ju Moon, J. Jung, Ho Hyun Wang, Aamer Ali, C. Quist-Jensen, F. Macedonio, Enrico Drioli, Y. Lee. 2020
148 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Herein, we introduce a novel membrane-based process for lithium recovery and compare it to the conventional solar evaporation followed by chemical precipitation process. Conventional technologies have limitations to meet the recent demand for massive lithium production due to several drawbacks of solar evaporation. Recently, in order to reduce the dependency of solar evaporation, several technologies have been proposed such as precipitation, ion-exchange, liquid-liquid extraction, adsorption, and electrodialysis. We suggest a novel membrane-based lithium recovery process by combining membrane distillation (MD) and nanofiltration (NF) to concentrate a brine solution containing lithium and to remove divalent ions. The proposed membrane-based process was demonstrated to concentrate 100 ppm lithium solution in artificial brine to 1200 ppm lithium solution within several days and exhibited up to 60 times higher water flux (22.5 L m−2 h−1) than that of solar evaporation (0.37 L m−2 h−1 at 30 °C and 0.56 L m−2 h−1 at 50 °C). Moreover, the NF process can suppress crystal formation to prevent process failure while alleviating the massive chemical usage of the conventional process. As a result, the proposed membrane-based process showed a possibility to utilize the low concentration of lithium brine with one-tenth of capital cost, process time, and foot-print of the conventional process, and represented a competitive operating cost with the conventional process which can be reduced further by harnessing the waste heat from the industrial plants and solar energy.
Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Mechanical Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a82821ce71c50d80c93202ff474efe2f6b04eafb
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Citations in the corpus
- Industrial Recycling of Lithium-Ion Batteries—A Critical Review of Metallurgical Process Routes (2020, background): “Examples are the selective carbonation of Li [93,94] and the application of ion-selective membranes [95,96].”