Due to the development of electric cars and large-scale energy storage systems, the demands of lithium for batteries are increasing continuously these days. Therefore, lithium is considered as an important resource. Currently, the majority of lithium is supplied from the brine lakes located in South America. In these lithium production sites, the lithium ions are recovered by lime soda evaporation method. This method recovers lithium by evaporation and precipitation, which makes the performance of this process easily affected by the ion composition of the source water. However, the increased consumption of lithium made people get interested in other brine lakes which couldn’t be utilized for lithium production. Moreover, there were trials to recover lithium from other source water including seawater and wastewater. For developing the new lithium production sites, the novel technologies are required because the composition of ion species in these sites is not suitable for applying the conventional lithium recovery method. Recently, the electrochemical methods are proposed by several researchers, which consist of a lithium ion selective electrode (λ-MnO<sub>2</sub>) and an anion capturing electrode (Ag). Using this system, lithium ions were successfully recovered with low energy and high selectivity. Also, the system showed good recyclability. However, the previous researches on electrochemical lithium recovery process showed the excellence of lithium recovery performance only in the brine lake water which has favorable condition for lithium recovery (using Salar de Atacama brine in Chile). In this study, the various kinds of source water with different ion composition were considered for electrochemical lithium recovery process. We found that the lithium recovery performance is closely related to the applied current, the characteristics of electrode material and the ion composition of the source water. From these observations, the optimized system conditions and the high-performance electrode materials in the various kinds of source water were proposed.

Effect of ion composition and electrode properties on electrochemical lithium ion recovery process for application in various source waters

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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