Molecular Sponge-Like Material To Remove Contamination From Water:
Team at Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune came up with a custom-designed unique molecular sponge-like material macro/microporous ionic organic framework, which can swiftly clean, polluted water by soaking up contaminants.
- Commonly utilised sorbent materials often trap these pollutants through ion-exchange strategy to purify water but suffer from poor kinetics and specificity.
- To mitigate this issue, IISER has prepared a newly engineered material called viologen-unit grafted organic-framework (iVOFm).
- The material employs amalgamation of electrostatics driven ion-exchange combined with nanometer-sized macropores and specific binding sites for the targeted pollutants.
- The size and number of tunable macropores along with the strong electrostatic interaction of iVOFm can quickly remove various toxic pollutants from water.
- The fast pollutant trapping capacity is attributed to faster diffusion of pollutants through the ordered interconnected presence of macropores in the material.
- This cationic compound is adaptable for sequestering various pollutants and is a possible solution to the water pollution problem.
iVOFm:
- Viologen-unit grafted organic-framework (iVOFm) is a unique molecular sponge-like material to clean polluted water by soaking up the contaminants in it.
- There are carcinogenic pollutants in freshwater sources that are removed using sorbent materials and ion-exchange techniques, but these techniques are not effective enough. iVOFm aims to improve this.
- iVOFm employs amalgamation of electrostatics driven ion-exchange combined with nanometer-sized macropores and specific binding sites for the targeted pollutants.
- The inherent cationic nature of iVOFm and macroporosity allows fast diffusion of pollutants.
- Unlike normal sorbent materials, this material is found to be very selective toward toxic pollutants. It can be used several times just like a bath sponge.
