“The extreme selectivity offered by our SSE-based approach makes it a highly efficient method for lithium harvesting as energy is only expanded towards moving the desired lithium ions across the membrane.”
Experimental results show improvements
In experiments using an electrodialysis setup, the SSE membrane demonstrated near-perfect lithium selectivity, even in high concentrations of competing ions.
Notably, no other ions were detected in the product stream, which is a feat that conventional membrane technologies could not achieve.
Through computational and experimental analysis, the researchers discovered that the rigid, tightly packed crystalline lattice of the SSE acts as a “molecular sieve.”