01-Oct-2021 | Market Research Store
Lithium is in massive demand owing to its extensive usage in smartphones, laptops, or electric vehicles. Although the availability of lithium across the world is sufficient, the existing approaches to extract the element are complicated and inefficient.
To power electronic goods, automobiles, and a wide range of other devices, an interdisciplinary team of scientists and engineers developed an approach to extract lithium from polluted water. The research has been published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Proceedings of National Academies of Sciences. In South America, the lithium element is extracted from salt brine using solar evaporation, which is a prolonged, cost-effective, and inefficient method.
For effective separation of lithium over other similar ions like sodium, the team of researchers from the University of California and the University of Texas designed membranes, which considerably improve the accumulating efficiency of the desired element.
Benny Freeman, who is a co-author on the research, stated that the research findings beget with numerous suggestions for confronting major resource constraints for lithium element, with the capability to separate it from wastewater released during gas and oil production for batteries
Water emitted from hydraulic fracturing at Texas's Eagle Ford Shale contains an ample amount of lithium to produce batteries for 1.7 million smartphones or 300 electric vehicle batteries. This novel technique has a great opportunity to significantly increase lithium production, which leads to a slash in the costs of final products.
The researchers created an innovative polymer membrane using crown ethers that can target certain molecules in water. This is an essential feature required for the extraction of lithium and the membrane has specific chemical functionality to adhere to certain ions.
In these newly developed materials, lithium moves more swiftly than sodium, which is one of the common contaminants in lithium-containing brines. By computer modeling, the researchers found that the sodium ions slowed down the transmission speed of crown ethers by binding with them. On the contrary, lithium ions travel more rapidly through the polymer as they remain unbound.
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