Extraction of Lithium from Spent Lithium-ion Batteries (LIBs) using Cation Exchange Resin

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Considering the lithium (Li) supply crisis and the regulations around recycling, sustainable extraction of Li from spent lithium-ion batteries (LiBs) is critical. Recently, recovery of Li from spent LiBs by water leaching has been investigated, and a high leaching selectivity towards Li is reported by fine-tuning the pH among other factors leading to the introduction of Na+ ions, which complicates selective Li recovery. Further, the low Li concentration makes the downstream precipitation challenging without an intermediate energy-intensive evaporative step. Herein, we employ Amberlite-H+, a commercially available cation exchange resin to investigate its suitability in the extraction of Li from water leachates of black mass. The water leachate containing 135 mg/L Li was prepared at optimized conditions of 25 °C, S/L (black mass/water) of 20 g/L, and a pH of 10. The extraction of Li from this water leachate by Amberlite-H+ was studied to optimize the reaction time, and various S/L ratios of Amberlite-H+ to leachate were investigated. The kinetic experiments showed that the extraction of Li from the water leachate reaches equilibrium before 30 minutes. The effect of S/L ratios was investigated at the optimized reaction time and the results showed that at S/L (g/L) of 20, 40, and 60, the uptake capacity of Li (mgLi+/gresin) is 5.34, 3.06, and 2.15, respectively. The Li-loaded resins were washed with 100 mL of 1 M HCl to desorb Li, achieving 97 – 99 % desorption yield.