LITHIUM-ION CONCENTRATION USING FORWARD OSMOSIS PROCESS

Abstract

A massive increase in global lithium demand has occurred, primarily because of its critical role in Lithium-ion battery manufacture as well as portable electronics production having numerous devices. The necessity for environmentally friendly approaches aimed at extracting lithium sustainably and in a way that is effective is increasingly being seen as critical due to the transition to clean energy sources going global. Extracting lithium in the traditional way from brine sources involves using bygone and extremely slow through-solar evaporation methods that deplete natural resources and pose risks to the environment besides being time consuming. This study looks into how forward osmosis (FO) membrane technology might be employed for concentrating lithium solutions derived from brine or any other dilute solutions with Li ions. Stance of forward osmosis is a process used because of differences in osmotic pressure, which has many advantages in comparison to usual methods due to lower energy consumption, an individual does not have to worry about being eco-friendly while at the same time scalability is a benefit. A high-salinity brines is the most suitable place for FO, unlike RO because this technology operates at lower pressures as well as having more resilient membranes verses fouling and scaling.