Development of λ-MnO2 Adsorbent for Lithium Recovery from Salt Lake Brine

Lithium is widely used in industry products such as pottery or glass additives, glass flux for continuous casting of steel, grease, medicine, battery. In particular, since lithium ion batteries, which are secondary batteries, have high energy density and high voltage, recent applications have expanded as batteries for electronic devices such as laptop computers, as automotive batteries for electric vehicles or hybrid vehicles. Therefore, demand for lithium is rapidly increasing. However, in the recovery of lithium from a salt lake, brine containing many impurities such as sulfate and magnesium ions are not effectively utilized because solar evaporation cannot be used. We developed the λ-MnO2 adsorbent in order to selectively recover lithium from such brine. In this study, we investigated the adsorption characteristics such as adsorption capacity, adsorption rate and selectivity of lithium by batch mixing and column test using simulated brine. The adsorbent prepared by hydrometallurgical process had higher adsorption capacity and rate of lithium than the adsorbent prepared by pyrometallurgical process.