3D POROUS MACROSTRUCTURES FOR WATER TREATMENT

Contamination of water resources with dissolved and bulk pollutants is a major environmental concern, impacting the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Given the scarcity of water resources, developing efficient strategies for removal of various classes of contaminants from water is highly desirable. As such, nano-enabled water treatment solutions have been suggested to be the next generation technology for efficient removal of contaminants from water. We develop advanced filtration solutions based on self-assembled 2D nanomaterials such as graphene oxide and its analogues for point-of-use water treatment. These 3D self-assembled macrostructures are high surface area and versatile platform solutions that can be decorated with various molecules to make them selective towards specific legacy or emerging water contaminants, through a bait-hook-destroy mechanism. Our work will be of interest to communities with limited access to centralized water treatment facilities.

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Related Publications:

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•    “Environmental performance of graphene-based 3D macrostructures”, N Yousefi, XL Lu, M Elimelech and N Tufenkji, Nature Nanotechnology (2019), 14, 107–119.

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•    “Hierarchically porous, ultra-strong reduced graphene oxide-cellulose nanocrystal sponges for exceptional adsorption of water contaminants”, N Yousefi, KKW Wong, Z Hosseinidoust, HO Sørensen, S Bruns, Y Zheng and N Tufenkji, Nanoscale (2018), 10, 7171–7174.

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•    “Antimicrobial hierarchically porous graphene oxide sponges for water treatment”

A Filina, N Yousefi, M Okshevsky and N Tufenkji, ACS Applied Bio Materials (2019), 2, 1578–1590.