Scientists from the University of Rochester have developed recent electrochemical approaches to wash up pollution from “ceaselessly chemicals” present in clothing, food packaging, firefighting foams, and a big selection of other products. A brand new Journal of Catalysis study describes nanocatalysts developed to remediate per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, often known as PFAS.
The researchers, led by assistant professor of chemical engineering Astrid Müller, focused on a selected form of PFAS called Perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), which was once widely used for stain-resistant products but is now banned in much of the world for its harm to human and animal health. PFOS continues to be widespread and protracted within the environment despite being phased out by US manufacturers within the early 2000s, continuing to point out up in water supplies.
Müller and her team of materials science PhD students created the nanocatalysts using her unique combination of experience in ultrafast lasers, materials science, chemistry, and chemical engineering.
“Using pulsed laser in liquid synthesis, we are able to control the surface chemistry of those catalysts in ways you can not do in traditional wet chemistry methods,” says Müller. “You’ll be able to control the dimensions of the resulting nanoparticles through the light-matter interaction, mainly blasting them apart.”
The scientists then adhere the nanoparticles to carbon paper that’s hydrophilic, or drawn to water molecules. That gives an inexpensive substrate with a high surface area. Using lithium hydroxide at high concentrations, they completely defluorinated the PFOS chemicals.
Müller says that for the method to work at a big scale, they may must treat not less than a cubic meter at a time. Crucially, their novel approach uses all nonprecious metals, unlike existing methods that require boron-doped diamond. By their calculations, treating a cubic meter of polluted water using boron-doped diamond would cost $8.5 million; the brand new method is almost 100 times cheaper.
Harnessing PFAS chemicals in sustainable ways
In future studies, Müller hopes to know why lithium hydroxide works so well and whether even inexpensive, more abundant materials could be substituted to bring the fee down further. She also desires to apply the strategy to an array of PFAS chemicals which can be still prevalently used but have been linked to health issues starting from development in babies to kidney cancer.
Müller says that despite their issues, outright banning all PFAS chemicals and substances will not be practical due to their usefulness in not only consumer products, but in green technologies as well.
“I might argue that ultimately, lots of decarbonization efforts — from geothermal heat pumps to efficient refrigeration to solar cells — rely upon the provision of PFAS,” says Müller. “I consider it’s possible to make use of PFAS in a circular, sustainable way if we are able to leverage electrocatalytic solutions to interrupt fluorocarbon bonds and get the fluoride back out safely without putting it into the environment.”
Although commercialization is a great distance off, Müller filed a patent with support from URVentures, and foresees it getting used at wastewater treatment facilities and by corporations to wash up contaminated sites where they used to provide these PFAS chemicals. She also calls it a social justice issue.
“Often in areas with lower income across the globe, there’s more pollution,” says Muller. “A bonus of an electrocatalytic approach is you can use it in a distributed fashion with a small footprint using electricity from solar panels.”
