Prelims - Current events of National & International importance and General Science.
Why in News?
Recently, Scientists from the Institute of Nano Science and Technology (INST) in Mohali, IIT-Dharwad, and IIT-Kharagpur have designed a cheap reusable water filter.
- Need - Dyes such as Congo Red and Methylene Blue are industrial pollutants released into rivers and groundwater causes stomach, skin, and breathing illnesses.
- Exiting filtering methods - These are costly and having higher foot print as they burn through chemicals and electricity.
- For example - Ozone, Fenton chemistry and other methods work to clean the water.
- Filter specification - First 3D printed thin, sponge-like sheets of polylactic acid (PLA), a biodegradable plastic often used in compostable cups.
- PLA is naturally water-repelling, So that it was soaked in a mild sodium-hydroxide solution to make it water-loving.
- Made up of - Nanoparticles of bismuth ferrite (BFO) and dipped the prepared PLA sheets into a BFO ink.
- The treated sheets stayed strong through five reuse cycles, losing only about 3% of their cleaning power.
- Mode of operation - Combining both light and vibration yielded piezo-photocatalysis, a process that worked day or night.
- Components –
- Visible light - Under it, BFO acted like a solar-powered catalyst that split water molecules and created highly reactive radicals that shred organic dye molecules.
- Ultrasound shaking - BFO’s piezoelectric nature generated an internal electric field that drove the same radical-making reactions even in the dark.
- Working - When light and vibration were used together, the filter removed about 99% of Congo Red and 74% of Methylene Blue in 90 minutes.
- It also partially cleaned real wastewater collected from a textile plant.
- Capability –Tto understand performance the computer fed by thousands of experimental data points, including dye concentration, catalyst amount, light intensity, and ultrasound frequency.
- Modern algorithms such as random forests, XGBoost, and an artificial neural network are used and got results far beyond the experimental ones.
- Deployment – At near treatment plants.
- Developments underway - For its use in Jal Nigam and Namami Gange projects as well.
- Efforts are underway to make this product more sustainable using plant-derived products.
Reference
The Hindu| Reusable Water Filter with Light and Vibration
