Sustainable and Rapid Water Purification at the Confined Hydrogel Interface

Min Chen; Jun Jiang; Weixin Guan; Zhijian Zhang; Xin Zhang; Wenxiong Shi; Ligang Lin; Kongyin Zhao; Guihua Yu

doi:10.1002/adma.202311416

Sustainable and Rapid Water Purification at the Confined Hydrogel Interface

Adv Mater. 2024 May;36(18):e2311416. doi: 10.1002/adma.202311416. Epub 2024 Jan 29.

Authors

Min Chen^{1

2}, Jun Jiang¹, Weixin Guan³, Zhijian Zhang⁴, Xin Zhang⁵, Wenxiong Shi⁶, Ligang Lin¹, Kongyin Zhao¹, Guihua Yu³

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Separation Membranes and Membrane Processes/National Centre for International Joint Research on Separation Membranes, Tiangong University, Tianjin, 300387, P. R. China.
² Center for Water and Ecology, State Key Joint Laboratory of Environment Simulation and Pollution Control, School of Environment, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, P. R. China.
³ Materials Science and Engineering Program and Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, 78712, USA.
⁴ SINOPEC Beijing Research Institute of Chemical Industry, Beijing, 100013, China.
⁵ Energy Research Institute @ NTU, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 639141, Singapore.
⁶ Institute for New Energy Materials and Low Carbon Technologies, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tianjin University of Technology, Tianjin, 300384, China.

PMID: 38253376
DOI: 10.1002/adma.202311416

Abstract

Emerging organic contaminants in water matrices have challenged ecosystems and human health safety. Persulfate-based advanced oxidation processes (PS-AOPs) have attracted much attention as they address potential water purification challenges. However, overcoming the mass transfer constraint and the catalyst's inherent site agglomeration in the heterogeneous system remains urgent. Herein, the abundant metal-anchored loading (≈6-8 g m^-2) of alginate hydrogel membranes coupled with cross-flow mode as an efficient strategy for water purification applications is proposed. The organic flux of the confined hydrogel interfaces sharply enlarges with the reduction of the thickness of the boundary layer via the pressure field. The normalized property of the system displays a remarkable organic (sulfonamides) elimination rate of 4.87 × 10⁴ mg min^-1 mol^-1. Furthermore, due to the fast reaction time (<1 min), cross-flow mode only reaches a meager energy cost (≈2.21 Wh m^-3) under the pressure drive field. It is anticipated that this finding provides insight into the novel design with ultrafast organic removal performance and low techno-economic cost (i.e., energy operation cost, material, and reagent cost) for the field of water purification under various PS-AOPs challenging scenarios.

Keywords: cross‐flow catalysis; metal‐based alginate hydrogel, sustainable design; water purification.

Abstract

Grants and funding