Ultra-selective chelating membranes for recycling of cobalt from lithium-ion spent battery effluents by electrodialysis

The recovery of valuable resources from spent effluents is critical to ensure sustainable growth and reduce commodity shortages at global levels. Spent batteries are largely untapped resources containing multiple high-value metal ions that may be harnest and resued indefinitely to develop a circular battery economy. Challenges however lay with the cost of purification and recovery strategies and the limited selectivity of existing processes. This work presents the development of selective cation exchange membranes suitable for the selective recovery of cobalt from mixtures of lithium, cobalt, and nickel from spent battery effluents. Efficient cation exchange membranes were generated by modifying poly(vinyl chloride) films with ethylene diamine followed by grafting of 5-chloro-8-hydroxyquinoline (5C8Q) chelating agents and two synthesis routes were compared including surface and bulk grafting and the membrane separation properties were benchmarked against CIMS Neosepta. Besides being stable across a pH range between 2 and 8, relevant to spent battery lixiviat, the surface grafted membranes exhibited the lowest energy of sorption in comparison to bulk membranes, which was ten times lower than that of the commercial CIMS Neosepta reference membranes. The transfer of ions from model single salt solutions across the surface grafted membranes allowed for over 60 % of cobalt recovery within 1 h, while nickel and lithium were transferred only up to 18 % and 0.2 %, respectively. In addition, the electrodialysis-based separation of multi-component solutions remained very cost-effective with cobalt ion removal amounts up to 58 %, leading to Co/Li separation factors as high as 247. This novel chelating agent strategy opens avenues for the development of highly efficient and selective membrane materials, which are able to operate in extreme pH environments and supporting ultra-selective ionic transfer.