ara018 Nature inspires, Tectrclogy-Oriven
NATURE INSPIRED,
TECHNOLOGY DRIVEN
May 1, 2018
By Alanna Maya
Assistant Editor
‘Sponsored by
New and innovative technology, inspired by natural systems, is set to disrupt
the clean water space.
Cape Town. Flint. California. Each are examples of how precious drinking water is,
and how faulty systems can affect a large population. According to The New
Republic, 5,000 drinking water systems in the United States had health-based
violations in 2015, and more than 50 percent were systems that serve 500 people or
fewer.
It’s a big issue, and one that continues to attract the attention of engineers, chemists
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and utility plant managers on a quest to find new and innovative treatment solutions
— many of which take cues from the natural world. From plant life to cellular
technology, researchers are emulating nature to develop the technology that will
solve the world’s water cri
Here, we've gathered up some of the most interesting technology set to disrupt the
clean water space.
Scientists at PNNL have created a new family of
nanotubes that are composed of peptide-like
molecules called peptoids. These nanotubes start out
as small droplets that come together to form a cell
membrane-like sheet. Then the sheet folds at one end
and zips closed into a tube. Photo courtesy PNNIL.
TOTALLY TUBE-ULAR
Hollow nanotubes thousands of times smaller than a strand of human hair could
revolutionize water filtration, tissue engineering and other applications. The tubes,
designed by a team of scientists at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest
National Laboratory (PNNL), were inspired by protein structures called
microtubules that live inside cells.
The scientists hope to use hollow microtubules to create a robust water filtration
system that would trap salt or other contaminants inside and let pure water flow out.
In addition, they want to monitor how stem cells adapt to different environments by
studying how the cells change while they grow on these tubes.
But the researchers can’t use microtubules themselves for these projects becaus
they are susceptible to temperature changes and microbes. “You don’t want to have
a filter that can be eaten by bacteria,” said Chun-Long Chen, the materials chemist
who conceived of and directed the project.
“The structure of the cell is so beautiful,” he said, “We wanted to create a synthetic
system that mimics the microtubule structure and is stable enough for a variety of
technical applications.”
The synthetic version uses protein-like molecules called peptoids. Like proteins,
peptoids are composed of a repeating pattern of building blocks with slight
variations, but peptoids are more stable,
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These new nanotubes form in a unique way. From the groups findings: “First, small
peptoid particles come together to form a sheet, Then the sheet closes at one end
and rolls into a seamless tube.” The group found it could control a tube’s size,
diameter, thickness and stiffness by adjusting the tube composition or changing the
acidity of the solution.
The findings are promising, according to Chen. “Nature has offered us all kinds of
beautiful examples,” he said. “Fish can take in water from the sea without having to
worry about high salt conditions. If we could mimic this behavior by building
artificial cell membranes containing these nanotubes, we could solve some of the big
problems facing our world today.”
SLICK HARVESTING
Inspired by the way water is collected by living organisms, scientists at The
University of Texas at Dallas and Penn State University have created and tested a
combination of materials that can do the same thing, but faster.
This image shows a comparison of water
harvesting performance of SRS vs. other
state-of-the-art liquid repellent surfaces.
The left panel is a directional slippery
rough surface (SRS, this study), the
middle panels a slippery liquid-infused
Porous surface (SLIPS) and the right
panel is a superhydrophobic surface
Photo courtesy Xianming Dai/Nan
SundJing Wang/Tak-Sing Wong, Penn,
State.
“With an estimated 4 billion people living in a situation of water scarcity during at
least some part of the year, an inexpensive method for harvesting water from water
vapor or from fog droplets in air could have enormous practical applications, and
will help alleviate the water scarcity issues in many regions of the world,” said the
project’s leader, Tak-Sing Wong, who is the Wormley Family Early Career
Professor in Engineering and assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Penn
State.
Wong's team examined textures on rice leaves and pitcher plants — both of which
can trap and direct water droplets — and engineered a surface that they then
infused with a liquid lubricant that attracts water. Using their material, they were
able to capture water droplets from fog and air vapor, and direct them quickly into
reservoirs via lubricated microgrooves.
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The researchers’ hydrophilic directional slippery rough surfaces (SRS) “combined
the slippery interface of a pitcher plant with the surface architecture of a rice leaf,
which has micro/nanoscale directional grooves on its surface that allow water to be
removed very easily in one direction but not the other,” explained Simon Dai, an
assistant professor at UT Dallas.
SRS can be optimized and adjusted to fit specific applications in a broad range of
industries, including air conditioning, power generation, desalination and water
harvesting in arid regions, according to the researchers, If the material is produced at
scale, the team estimates it can collect over 120 liters of water per square meter
(26.52 gallons per square yard) of the surface per day. That number could grow if
the material can be further optimized. The researchers have filed a patent on the
technology.
“We are hopeful that these surfaces can be scaled up or down depending upon
need,” Dai said. “Next steps would include improving water harvesting capabilities
at lower humidity ranges.”
CLEAN WITH GREEN
Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science (CSRS) in
Japan are using moss to remove lead and other metals from water.
Phytoremediation is a method that uses photosynthesizing organisms to clean up soil
or water contamination.
“We found that moss can function as an excellent lead absorbent when in the
protonema stage of development,” said first author Misao Itouga.
In particular, the moss Funaria hygrometrica, which is known to grow well in sites
contaminated with metals like copper, zinc, and lead, may have other uses.
Ttouga and his team first placed the moss protonema in a lead-based solution for 22
hours. Within the moss protonema cells, more than 85 percent of the lead had
accumulated in the cell walls, with smaller amounts being found in organelle
membranes and inside the chloroplasts where photosynthesis occurs.
The team found that the cell walls of the moss absorbed lead even after being
removed from living moss. According to a press release, “further analysis with two-
dimensional nuclear magnetic resonance indicated that polygalacturonic acid in the
cell walls was responsible for absorbing the lead,” and “is a useful biomaterial for
recovering lead from aqueous solutions.”
While the researchers initially hope to treat wastewater from mining and chemical
industries, the technology could be used for indirect potable reuse programs to boost
water supply in the future.
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Cells treated with 0.1
millimolar (rmM) PbCI2. This
View focuses on the cell
wall (cw). Absorbed lead
(Pb) can be seen at the
black arrows. The upper
boxis a close-up of the
lower black box on the cell
wall. Photo courtesy RIKEN,
CALIFORNIA DREAMING
As a state that has been continually plagued by droughts, California is poised to
tackle the water supply issue head-on. Seven California colleges were recently
awarded grants to fund proposals to develop new water conservation and supply
technologies as part of the 2018 Southern California World Water Forum. The
$10,000 grants were awarded to projects that “propose and explore innovative ways
to provide safe water to communities in California and around the world.”
“Our California colleges and universities are fertile ground to develop the next
generation of sustainable technologies,” said Jeffrey Kightlinger, general manager of
the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, one of the World Water
Forum co-sponsors. “These ideas help ensure water reliability not only in local
communities where they are greatly needed but also across the globe.”
Through the program, grant winners must design a project or prototype that will
contribute to a more sustainable water future, including developing a business plan
and providing evidence it could become fully sustainable,
Among this year’s selected proposals is one from the University of California at
Davis, where researchers will further develop and test a solar-powered water
treatment system that could be used in rural, underserved communities. A San
Diego State University project to find a lower cost and less energy-intensive
approach to seawater desalination will explore using low-grade waste heat to convert
seawater to vapor and then condense it to form pure water.
Solving the global water crisis is an ambitious pursuit and seemingly insurmountable
challenge, but innovations like these and others give hope that a solution may not lie
too far in the future. WW
About the Author: Alanna Maya is the assistant editor for WaterWorld and Industrial
WaterWorld. Email her at alannam@pennwell.com
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