Dynamic Feasibility and Stability Analysis for Sustainable Lithium Extraction in the Salton Sea

Overview

The Salton Sea, once a popular destination for vacation and bird watching, is currently unsustainable, posing health hazards and ecological instability in the region. Despite growing traction in lithium extraction, existing frameworks primarily predict environmental outcomes and do not determine whether such projects can be structured to ensure long-term sustainability for the Salton Sea. Therefore, our goal is to determine the minimum intervention required by policymakers and companies to make such a system sustainable: specifically, by developing a system of ODEs that models the dynamics of salinity and volume under controlled extraction. By using this framework, we plan on optimizing a feasibility bound on controllable parameters that differentiate sustainable from unsustainable operating regimes. Using the mathematical framework, we constructed case studies for the Salton Sea based on current data and metrics. Through this, the existence of a feasible operating space for Qb and Qp variables were proven, alongside stability analysis to determine long term patterns in salinity and volume change. This study allows for policymakers to directly analyze the implications and requirements of sustainable practices, creating a system that not only establishes sustainability but also determines the necessary interventions to ensure it.

Competition history

• CSEF 2026 Environmental Engineering (Track 2) (Senior Division) · Entry S-12-21

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Environmental Engineering projects
• CSEF Environmental Engineering projects
• Every CSEF 2026 project