#208 - Na-cations, Plasmonic dimes, SolarPass floating beads, and a Ukraine water filter plant
Water Water Everywhere...
Hey Readers,
This week we change things up a bit and start with some good news and then get into innovations from there.
Some things are basic requirements irrespective of the ongoing conflict, so it’s good to see that with help from USAID, a water filter production enterprise in the Kyiv region resumed production after Russia destroyed its facilities. More power to them.
Now onto the innovations
Solar powered floating beads to clean up oil sand tailings
We talked last week about clay pellets floating on water to help clean it up. This week we have innovators from Alberta, Canada, taking it a step further. They’re using similar technology to clean produced water. Quick refresher: Produced water is the toxic slush left after clean water is used to push oil out of the ground/ oil sands. In Canada since they extract from oil sands, they call it oil sand tailings. (which is just semantics in our opinion). Unsurprisingly, this produced water contain organic compounds that are toxic to aquatic life. Electrochemical treatment can help break down these contaminants, but such approaches require a lot of electricity and added chemicals.
Enter this startup that have developed tiny floating beads that are coated with a catalyst which harnesses the energy from sunlight to produce powerful oxidants which can break down contaminants. The catalyst doesn’t get used up in the reaction, making this solar-activated approach a low-energy, non-toxic, reusable solution for water treatment. They go on to say that their tech can be used on everything from 1,4-dioxane, to algal toxins (cyanotoxins), ammonia, pesticides and even pharmaceuticals.
Pharma waste detection with a plasmonic-disc
Most research starts with understanding what element / compound can be the canary in the coal mine. In this innovation, researchers at Bar-Ilan University, Israel focused on detecting Piperidine. What you say? - well, piperidine is a potent molecule that serves as a building block in the pharmaceutical and food additive industries, which presents health risks to both humans and animals due to its toxic nature.
M. R. Hamode, A. Krause, M. shehadeh, T. Zar, B. schmerling, I. Pinkas, D. Zitoun and A. Salomon, Environ. Sci.: Nano, 2024, DOI: 10.1039/D3EN00821E.
Having chosen their canary, they created a novel method to detect piperidine residue in water. They developed a dime-sized, highly sensitive detector. The detector is built of a plasmonic substrate developed at the university, comprising triangular cavities milled in a silver thin film and protected by a 5-nanometer layer of silicon dioxide, offers unparalleled sensitivity to piperidine, detecting low concentrations in water. These holes, smaller than the wavelength of visible light, enhance the electrical field on the surface, leading to concentrated light in very small areas. This amplification enables identification of a low concentration of molecules that were previously undetectable with optical probes. Now to take it from the lab setting into the real world.
Filtering out radioactive elements, gases and more!
And finally for this week we have a very Russian solution to a very Russian problem. Scientists at the south Ural State University have patented a method for purifying groundwater from radon, alpha activity, iron, manganese, hardness salts, and carbon dioxide, simultaneously. Based on the researcher’s personal experience with well water contaminated with iron, manganese, radon, alpha activity and dissolved carbon dioxide, they developed a solution that combines sodium-cationization and aeration.
The sodium-cationization method is widely used for softening, deferrization, demanganization and removal of radionuclide cations. However, water after cationization becomes hard water and causes corrosion of sanitary equipment. To combat that, they developed an aeration stage to soften the water and remove harder minerals like iron as well as to stabilize the water and remove odours. They take pains to point out that there are no similar technical solutions in Russia.
That is it for this Friday, until next week,
Peace!