Rockwell Automation supports environmentally friendly lithium production to secure UK supply

Posted On: April 28, 2023

Choice of Rockwell Automation’s next-generation distributed control system provides Cornish Lithium with a means of high-fidelity control

BRUSSELS, April 27, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Rockwell Automation, Inc. (NYSE: ROK), the world’s largest company dedicated to industrial automation and digital transformation, is working with Cornish Lithium Plc to develop a demonstration plant to validate sustainable lithium production. micaceous granite hydroxide.

The Cornish Lithium demonstration plant will be piloted by the PlantPAx® Distributed Control System (DCS) from Rockwell Automation. This state-of-the-art system manages plant-wide I&C operations with a higher level of flexibility that enables better decision-making.

“Rockwell Automation has both the technology and the experience to support the complex lithium extraction process,” said Phil Hadfield, Managing Director of Rockwell Automation UK. We have successfully participated in lithium mining projects around the world, including Australia, Africa and South America. Rockwell Automation’s integrated architecture provides end-to-end integration of systems designed with scalability in mind, taking advantage of new advances in digital technology. »

Cornish Lithium has licensed an acid leaching, selective precipitation and crystallization process developed to produce lithium hydroxide from micaceous granite. This process is expected to be more environmentally friendly than the traditional hard rock process, which typically involves a significant calcination step, where the ore is calcined at 1,000°C.

The validity of this process has already been tested in a small pilot plant in Australia where it has been shown to produce lithium hydroxide salt monohydrate. The next step will be to build a demonstration plant at the company’s premises in Cornwall. This comprehensive conceptual process, from feedstock to lithium hydroxide, will use the same equipment as full-scale facilities, with one or two modifications made for scale reasons. This simulation of the actual process will allow all interested parties and potential customers to verify the effectiveness of the processing technology on ore mined in Cornwall before construction of a full-scale production facility begins.

“Rockwell Automation will play a crucial role in the work being done,” said David Moseley, process manager for hard rock minerals at Cornish Lithium. We want to simulate industrial process control as much as possible that we can use on a large scale. We made sure to incorporate these elements as much as possible in the demo plant, because it is a complex multi-step process, including many phases of recycling and sequential operation, especially with filtration, where process control is essential. Rockwell Automation implements a process control philosophy based on our instrumentation. It is a series of different process control units whose coordination allows the plant to operate efficiently. »

Two plants will be built: first, a mineral concentration unit where raw ore will be crushed, ground and separated to create a lithium-enriched mica concentrate; second, a chemical plant, whose hydrometallurgical acid leaching system produces lithium sulfate, which is converted to lithium hydroxide. This unit combines chemical reactors, precipitators, filtration and crystallization. The demo plant is currently under construction and is expected to operate for one year after commissioning.