New devices that float atop brine pools can speed the evaporation of lithium ponds, potentially making it cheaper and quicker to extract this high-demand metal.
More than half of the lithium produced worldwide for batteries and other industrial uses comes from concentrated brines found in Latin America, Chile, and Australia. Evaporating the water out of these concentrated brine pools requires multiple-football-field-sized ponds and can take up to 18 months. “There is a really urgent need to improve the efficiency,” says Zhiyong Jason Ren, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Princeton Univ.
To that end, Ren and his former postdoctoral researcher Sunxiang Sean Zheng cofounded Princeton Critical Minerals (PCM) to bring their novel technology to market. Pilot tests in northern Chile have shown that the devices, known as Lilypads, increase evaporation rates by 40% to 122% depending on the type of brine, the researchers recently reported in the journal Nature Water.
The Lilypads are black discs, approximately 1 m in diameter, made from solar-resistant plastic and buoyed by ball-shaped floats. They drift, unanchored, on the top of the brine ponds and concentrate solar energy on the surface of the water. The discs preferentially heat the surface of the water...
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