One Funded PhD Studentship: Selective Recovery of Lithium Ions from Water Using Functionalised Magnetic Colloids

Project Title: Selective recovery of lithium ions from water using functionalised magnetic colloids

The problem:

Our mitigation of the concurrent Climate Emergency is critically dependent upon a massive upscaling in the procurement of battery technology metals, in order to achieve our ambitious plans to electrify vast sectors of industry and society. Within this lithium is widely regarded as a vitally important metal and whilst the geosphere does possess a vast mass of lithium, its procurement does still present major challenges associated with limiting the resultant environmental disturbance and carbon footprint of such activity.

The solution:

There are currently immense quantities of lithium worldwide within aqueous resources, including geothermal waters, mine waters and sea water. The development of new technologies to selectively extract lithium from such matrices could therefore represent a major step forward in diversifying lithium supply chains and also potentially using dramatically lower energy input and with lower environmental disturbance than conventional approaches.

This PhD project will seek to deliver a new technology for the selective recovery of lithium from the aqueous phase. In particular the research will focus on developing a mechanistic understanding of how we can encapsulate magnetic colloids with surface functional groups/minerals in order to enable lithium recovery whilst excluding non-target metals.

The specific aims of project are to:

1. Collect and characterise lithium bearing waters from a variety of sources.
2. Determine how we can synthesise, and optimise the application of, next generation functionalised magnetic colloids which are selective for lithium removal from complex aqueous matrices.
3. Determine what hydrogeochemical conditions are best suited to control and optimise such lithium extraction processes.

This exciting project will benefit from the world-class facilities at the Camborne School of Mines & the Environment and Sustainability Institute, University of Exeter and will also comprise fieldwork (lithium-bearing water collection) at industrial sites in the UK.

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