Preparation and characterization of high-stability lithium ion-sieves with aluminosilicate framework

The ion exchange adsorption method is the most promising technique for lithium recovery from low-grade brines, and the main adsorbents are titanium-based and manganese-based ion-sieves. Their expensive cost and poor cycling performance, which have limited their industrial applications, need to be solved fundamentally by finding a new ion-sieve. Hence, in this work, a high-stability and low-priced lithium ion-sieve with aluminosilicate framework was successfully synthesized by solid-phase sintering. The cheap silicon and aluminum raw materials make this ion-sieve have a low synthesis cost. The adsorption behavior of ion-sieves fits the Langmuir model and pseudo-second-order kinetics, indicating that the adsorption of lithium is mainly monolayer adsorption, and the process is chemisorption. After ten cycles, the lithium adsorption capacity is still over 27 mg/g. Moreover, it can recover lithium in the brine of West Taijinar Salt Lake in China even at 160 °C due to the excellent stability of the aluminosilicate framework, which can effectively improve its industrial production efficiency. Therefore, it has great potential to extract lithium from liquid lithium resources with a high Mg/Li ratio.