Summary
Reliable access to critical minerals like lithium and cobalt is crucial to the nation’s economy. These materials are often found as dissolved ions in aqueous streams such as geothermal brines, water produced from oil drilling, leachates from mining, and industrial wastewater. Extracting these ions is difficult because they are mixed with similar, more abundant ions. Membranes can recover ions effectively, but they struggle to separate the desired ions from the undesired ones. This CAREER project will show how controlling the arrangement of chemical groups inside the pores of a membrane can imp
