(143f) Novel Adsorbent Design for Energy-Efficient and Economical Lithium Recovery from Unconventional Resources

Lithium (Li) is one of the critical materials, which is widely used for energy storage materials. Because of the high global demand and anticipated growth for Li, it is a key strategic goal to secure the domestic supply chain. This leads to exploiting unconventional Li resources including geothermal brines, oil & gas formation water, mine waters, etc. that are located within the U.S.However, the current lithium mining and separation processes using conventional hydrometallurgical and direct lithium extraction approaches are energy- or chemical-intensive to exploit these resources. Thus, it is critical to develop an efficient separation process to exploit these resources for Li. To that end, adsorption can be effective for the purification of Li from multicomponent separations. In this presentation, we will discuss the designing of novel adsorbents with zwitterionic functional groups for the efficient chromatographic process to separate Li from these unconventional resources. Experimental and simulation data of the zwitterionic adsorbents and the dynamic mechanisms of Li separations will be discussed. Finally, the use of these designed adsorbents for Li recovery in a scaled Simulated Moving Bed (SMB) process will be presented.