Basic study on direct preparation of lithium carbonate powders by membrane electrolysis

Abstract

In this work, membrane electrolysis technology is used to conduct the basic research on directly preparing lithium carbonate powders with lithium chloride solution, mainly exploring the influence of electrolyte concentrations, electrolyte temperature, current density and carbon dioxide flowrate on the physical phase, micro morphology and particle size of lithium carbonate. By comparing the results of XRD analysis and SEM micromorphology, it was found that the products with higher diffraction peak representing crystal plane (−110) had mostly lamellar planar structure, while the products with higher peak representing crystal plane (002) had mostly rod-like line type structure. Under the conditions of higher anolyte concentration, lower catholyte concentration, lower temperature and lower current density, is beneficial to obtain single crystal structure with small size, but the cross growth of numerous monocrystalline will increase the final crystal size. Besides, the smallest size product was obtained under the conditions of anolyte with LiCl concentration of 300 g/L, catholyte with LiCl concentration of 50 g/L, electrolyte temperature of 50 °C, current density of 100 mA/cm2 and carbon dioxide flowrate of 1.0 L/min. The experimental results show that it has great potential and space to research on the direct preparation of lithium carbonate by membrane electrolysis.