Due to the rapid
growth of the global electric vehicle and electronics
markets, lithium has become an indispensable resource for our lifestyle,
and numerous methods for securing lithium are being actively attempted.
For fast and environment-friendly lithium extraction, the electrochemical
lithium recovery (ELR) system was studied in recent years. However,
there are a limited number of studies regarding the system behavior
and most of them are focused on a batch operation, which is far from
practical usage. In this study, a flow-type rocking-chair ELR system
based on the λ-MnO2/LiMn2O4 electrode pair is proposed for efficient recovery of lithium ions
from influents. A lab-scale electrochemical experiment and a two-dimensional
numerical simulation are performed to comprehensively analyze the
system behavior. It is confirmed that lithium can be simultaneously
captured and released at each electrode without any extra electrode
regeneration steps. Apart from identifying its behavior experimentally,
the spatiotemporal concentration distribution of Li+ in
the separator channel is analyzed through numerical simulation. In
our system, Li+ is found to be successfully recovered from
the source with an energy consumption of 0.56 Wh mol–1 at 6.25 × 10–2 mA cm–2.