• 标题：Selective recovery of lithium resources in salt lakes by polyacrylonitrile/ion-imprinted polymer: Synthesis, testing, and computation
• 关键词：Ion-imprinted polymer;Nanofiber;Li(I) adsorption;Density functional theory;Salt-lake brine
• 作者：Tao Ding;Qian Wu;Zhen Nie;Mianping Zheng;Yunsheng Wang;Donghui Yang

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Lithium as a strategic metal exhibits extensive applications in the 21st century. The high-efficiency extraction of lithium resources is of economic significance as the market demand for electric vehicles powered by lithium-ion batteries increases rapidly. A novel silica gel (SG)/graphene oxide (GO) composite nanofiber was prepared by combining surface imprinting technology with electrospinning technology to capture Li(I) from salt lakes in an oriented manner. The batch adsorption experiments and fixed-bed adsorption experiments were conducted to evaluate the adsorption performance of the composites. The SG/GO composite exhibited a maximum adsorption capacity of 1.1 mg/g for Li(I). The adsorption kinetics tallied with the pseudo-second-order model, and the isothermal adsorption was similar to the Langmuir model. The adsorption process of the SG/GO composite is one of monolayer chemical adsorption, and the adsorbates did not interact. The adsorption mechanism was revealed by Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy and scanning electron microscopy (SEM), combined with density functional theory (DFT) computation. The mechanism analysis indicated that the charge transfer occurred between the surface functional groups and metal ions in the adsorption process. The electrons mainly transferred from the P and O atoms of the functional groups to the 3p orbit of Li(I) to form coordinate bonds, which finally achieved the goal of oriented capture of Li(I). The polyacrylonitrile (PAN)/ion-imprinted polymer (IIP) composite nanofiber is a novel, high-efficiency adsorbing material for recovering Li(I) from salt-lake brine.