Effect of Current Density and Mass Loading on the Performance of a Flow-Through Electrodes Cell for Lithium Recovery

Due to the predicted increase of the lithium demand, its production will soon become outpaced by the market need. The current lithium-extraction techniques, which are based on the soda-lime evaporation process, are not only too slow to meet this increasing demand, but they also produce a large amount of chemical wastes. An alternative electrochemical technique, called "ion pumping", has been recently proposed. In this work, we are exploring the effect of the current density and the mass loading on the performance of a flow-through electrodes cell, which recovers lithium by means of electrochemical ion pumping from a 1 mM LiCl and a 100 mM NaCl solution. We observed that, by increasing the mass loading of the lithium-capturing electrode, a larger amount of lithium could be captured per unit mass. The same result was obtained when the applied current density was decreased. It is striking that, by choosing the right cell parameters, an almost complete capturing of lithium from the source solution has been reached.