Five 500 collection cased peristaltic pumps from Watson-Marlow Fluid Technology Solutions are taking half in an necessary role in an indication plant at Cornish Lithium’s Shallow Geothermal Test Site in the UK.
Originally built to test the idea of extracting lithium from geothermal waters, Cornish Lithium is now working on an upgraded version of the test plant as its drilling program expands, finally with the goal of creating an environment friendly, sustainable and cost-effective lithium extraction supply chain.
The initial enquiry for pumps came from GeoCubed, a three method partnership between Cornish Lithium and Geothermal Engineering Ltd (GEL). GEL owns a deep borehole web site at United Downs in Cornwall where plans are in place to commission a £4 million ($5.2 million) pilot plant.
“GeoCubed’s process engineers helped us to design and fee the check plant forward of the G7, which would run on shallow geothermal waters extracted from Cornish Lithium’s personal analysis boreholes,” Dr Rebecca Paisley, Exploration Geochemist at Cornish Lithium, mentioned.
Adam Matthews, Exploration Geologist at Cornish Lithium, added: “Our shallow site centres on a borehole that we drilled in 2019. A particular borehole pump [not Watson-Marlow] extracts the geothermal water [mildly saline, lithium-enriched water] and feeds into the demonstration processing plant.”
The five Watson-Marlow 530SN/R2 pumps serve two completely different elements of the test plant, the first of which extracts lithium from the waters by pumping the brine from a container up by way of a column containing a massive number of beads.
“The beads have an lively ingredient on their floor that is selective for lithium,” Paisley explained. “As water is pumped by way of the column, lithium ions attach to the beads. With the lithium separated, we use two Watson-Marlow 530s to pump an acidic solution in varied concentrations by way of the column. The acid serves to remove lithium from the beads, which we then transfer to a separate container.
“The pumps are peristaltic, so nothing but the tube comes into contact with the acid resolution.”
She added: “We’re using the remaining 530 sequence pumps to assist perceive what other by-products we can make from the water. For occasion, we can reuse the water for secondary processes in trade and agriculture. For this reason, we now have two different columns working in unison to strip all different elements from the water as we pump it by way of.”
According to Matthews, move fee was among the many primary causes for selecting Watson-Marlow pumps.
“ Gift wanted a flow fee of 1-2 litres per minute to fit with our check scale, so the 530 pumps have been ideal,” he says. “The other consideration was choosing between guide or automated pumps. At the time, as a outcome of it was bench scale, we went for manual, as we knew it would be straightforward to make adjustments whereas we had been still experimenting with process parameters. However, any future industrial lithium extraction system would of course reap the benefits of full automation.
Paisley added: “The great thing about having these five pumps is that we can use them to assist evaluate different technologies transferring ahead. Lithium extraction from the kind of waters we find in Cornwall just isn’t undertaken anywhere else in the world on any scale – the water chemistry here is unique.
“It is actually necessary for us to undertake on-site take a look at work with a wide selection of totally different firms and technologies. We wish to devise essentially the most environmentally responsible answer using the optimum lithium recovery method, on the lowest potential working cost. Using local firms is a half of our strategy, significantly as continuity of supply is important.”
To assist fulfil the necessities of the next check plant, Cornish Lithium has enquired after extra 530SN/R2 pumps from Watson-Marlow.
“We’ve additionally requested a quote for a Qdos 120 dosing pump from Watson-Marlow, so we are ready to add a certain amount of acid into the system and obtain pH balance,” Matthews says. “We’ll be doing more drilling in the coming 12 months, which is in a position to permit us to test our expertise on a number of sites.”
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