Operation of Three-Stage Process of Lithium Recovery from Geothermal Brine: Simulation.

Lithium-rich geothermal waters are considered as an alternative source, and further concentration of lithium is required for its effective recovery. In this work, we have simulated a three-stage lithium recovery process including the brine softening by precipitation Ca/Mg cations with sodium carbonate (calculated in PHREEQC), followed by an integrated system consisting of membrane distillation unit (water evaporation), crystallizer (NaCl precipitation), and membrane extraction (Li recovery), which was simulated in Simulink/MATLAB. It was shown that the deterioration of membrane performance in time due to scaling/fouling plays a critical role in the performance of the system resulting in the dramatic increase of the replaced membrane modules by a factor of 5.