Tri(ethylene glycol) modified HYC‐100 resin for lithium ion recovery from aqueous solution

Abstract

Polymeric resin has shown great application in recovery the lithium ion from aqueous solution due to their structure's tunability and reusability. However, the conventional resins such as commercial HYC-100 is suffering by its low lithium adsorption capacity and slow inclusion rate. Herein, a series of HYC-100 modified resins (MRs) using oligo(ethylene glycol) as crosslinker were synthesized and their adsorption capacities for lithium ion in aqueous solution (pH 9.1, ionic concentration 500 mg/L, 25 C) were determined by adding 1 g resin to 500 mL lithium chloride aqueous solution. The new formed cyclic structure from oligo(ethylene glycol) provides lithium ion binding sites which play an important role for lithium ion adsorption. The tri(ethylene glycol) modified resin (3EGMR) showed the highest capacity to be 18 mg/g, which was three times more than that of HYC-100 (5 mg/g). Therefore, Scale-up experiment was conducted by using 20 L reactor and the adsorption capacity is satisfactory. This work might pave a new avenue to develop new polymeric resin to enhance the lithium ion adsorption performance.