Lithium has been considered as a valuable raw material for the secondary battery which is indispensable in electronic products. Spinel typed lithium manganese oxides are the most effective adsorbent for the recovery of lithium from aqueous solution containing lithium ions. There have been many researches on the characterization and performance of the powder-type lithium manganese oxides and their derived adsorbents. However, powder-type adsorbent cannot be used directly for the practical application due to the recovery difficulty of adsorbent powder from aqueous solution. In addition, the practical recovery of lithium by a conventional desorption from the adsorbent still has drawbacks because it requires the use of hydrochloric acid, which is inevitable in the desorption process. This may give rise to environmental problem and decrease in economical efficiency of the recovery system because acid-based desorption process results in the dissolution of manganese with the repeated desorption process, which can destroy the structure of adsorbent. This also requires the addition of larger amount of alkali-solution (NaOH) to adjust pH in the following separation step of lithium lions. To solve this problem, we suggest a novel method that uses electrostatic field assistance with a modified membrane capacitive deionization (MCDI) to desorb lithium without using an acidic solution in which lithium adsorbent layer was introduced. The feasibility of this concept was confirmed by fabricating the electrode and unit cell with modifying the conventional MCDI system and testing its performance. The results of this test were compared to the conventional desorption process. The results showed that the suggested method is a feasible alternative, although the desorption efficiency is low compared to the conventional desorption process.

Improvement of lithium recovery system with an electrostatic field-assisted desorption process

248th National Meeting (2014)

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