The Pros And Cons Of Cleaning Water

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Cleaning water has always been a challenge for human beings when it came to removing certain substances like fine grains or crude oil for example. New research, however, comes from a chemical engineering team at Rice University and shows that there is a catalyst that works perfectly for obviating toxic nitrates out of water. In cleaning water and keeping it clean, some challenges have brought people to try to keep waters separate using graphene. This new study comes not long after expert chemists released findings in December that, contrary to the belief of many scientists, graphene fails to repel water when floating on water. Graphene is only one of many water filtration techniques—solutions that people have used to keep control over what materials sit in…show more content…
Now those who use graphene for any kind of water filtration want to figure out how to make it hydrophobic when it’s supposed to be. That’s where nanotechnology comes in. To clean toxic nitrates from drinking water, is already an otherwise insurmountable feat in and of itself. The Nanotechnology Enabled Water Treatment (NEWT) Center’s chemical engineers say that a one-step catalyst can be engineered to split nitrates into air and water. “Nitrates come mainly from agricultural runoff, which affects farming communities all over the world,” according to Michael Wong, the lead chemical engineer. “Nitrates are both an environmental problem and health problem because they’re toxic. There are ion-exchange filters that can remove them from water, but these need to be flushed every few months to reuse them, and when that happens, the flushed water just returns a concentrated dose of nitrates right back into the water supply.” Wong’s specialty is actually the development of catalysts using nanoparticles. His lab is dedicated to

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