National Taiwan University (NTU) researchers yesterday unveiled a water purification device that they said can absorb three times more pollutants than activated carbon and would help industrial plants reuse wastewater.
The deionization device could be used to process industrial wastewater and allow them to reuse the treated water in manufacturing processes, and it could also be used to remove calcium and magnesium in household drinking water to make it taste better, chemical engineering professor Kevin Wu (吳嘉文) told a news conference at the Ministry of Science and Technology in Taipei.
The key to purifying water is to remove heavy metal ions, Wu said, adding that previously used materials had insufficient capacity for absorbing pollutants due to their limited electrical conductivity.
Photo: Chien Hui-ju, Taipei Times
After experimenting with different materials, the team developed nitrogen-doped nanoporous carbon materials, which have larger surface areas allowing for enhanced electrosorption capacity, but their conductivity was still insufficient, he said.
To solve the issue, they embedded gold nanoparticles in the materials and added a highly conductive polymer, resulting in two new materials with higher conductivity and absorption capacity, he said.
The electrosorption capacities of existing activated carbon materials range from 5 to 10mg per gram, while those of their new materials can reach 15mg per gram or more, Wu said.
Additionally, deionization systems using reverse osmosis or electrodialysis techniques usually consume 2 to 8 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity per cubic meter of water processed, but theirs only uses 0.1 to 0.5kWh per cubic meter of water, he added.
Hou Chia-hung (侯嘉洪), an associate professor at NTU’s Graduate Institute of Environmental Engineering, utilized the materials and capacitive deionization techniques to develop the new energy-efficient device.
Although the team still needs one to three more years to make the product commercially viable, some firms have already expressed an interest in their technique, Hou said.
In addition to purifying water, the team also hopes to apply the device to collect rare earths, such as lanthanum and cerium, from water, Wu said.
The research led to the formation of the company Power Pure, whose CEO, Fan Chen-hsuan (范振軒) was a postdoctoral researcher at Hou’s laboratory.
Their findings were detailed in a paper published last year in issue No. 31 of the journal Nanoscale, where it was featured on its cover.
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