Will NEWT Change Water Treatment As We Know It?

By Peter Chawaga, Associate Editor, Water Online

The National Science Foundation has awarded its coveted Engineering Research Center (ERC) grant to a consortium developing a small-scale, mobile water treatment system designed to provide clean water to those who can’t be reached through municipal networks.

The grant is worth $18.5 million to be funded over five years, with the potential to be renewed for 10 years. It was awarded to a team led by experts from Rice University, Arizona State University, Yale University, and the University of Texas at El Paso collaborating with more than 30 industry, academic, and government partners.

The development of these mobile treatment sites, known as nanotechnology enabled water treatment systems (NEWT), were inspired by what director and principal investigator Pedro Alvarez saw as a pressing global need.

“No other resource is as necessary for life as is water, and providing it safely and universally is a grand challenge inextricably linked to public health, energy production, and sustainable development,” said Alvarez, who is a professor of chemistry, materials science, and nanoengineering at Rice. “The severity of this challenge is mounting as the global population increases, water pollution becomes more complex and difficult to mitigate, and climate change exacerbates fresh water scarcity. Technological innovation to exploit a broader range of water sources is vital for meeting this challenge, particularly for 43 million Americans and billions of people worldwide who lack access to municipal water networks.”

Organizing a team of diverse university researchers, plus partners like Shell, UNESCO, and NASA took over two years. Once the consortium’s scientific vision settled on the NEWT, it successfully proposed the establishment of the ERC, which will serve as Texas’ third-ever such multidisciplinary center. According to Rice, ERCs often become self-sustaining and achieve more than $40 million in research funding during their first decade of operation.

Behind The Tech

In many ways, it is easy to think of the NEWT as a shrink-ray version of a traditional water treatment plant. The breakthrough difference they possess is the use of nanotechnology for multifunctionality at the material and reactor levels, which allows for the compact, high-performance design to work off the grid.

The NEWT use of customized nanotechnology will remove the desired water pollutants through adsorption and utilize solar power. When describing the engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) behind the innovation, Alvarez is not afraid to get technical.

“By controlling the size, structure, and surface functionality of ENMs, we can tailor their electrical, optical, catalytic, magnetic and sorptive properties to facilitate selective adsorption of target contaminants, harvest sunlight to drive photocatalytic and thermal processes, and immobilize the nanomaterials or recover them from water,” Alvarez said.

The unique properties of the ENMs granted Alvarez and his team an opportunity to design a more efficient and multi-faceted treatment system in less space.

“The higher reactivity per atom of ENMs, compared with bulk materials, enables hyper-catalytic behaviors that destroy pollutants and pathogens more efficiently,” he said. “Because composite materials containing different ENMs create a synergistic effect, it is possible to engineer a single device that performs multiple treatment functions with easy regeneration of ENM functionality.”

Breaking Through

Alvarez sees this as a breakthrough that can change the way we treat water, from the chemical-dependent and energy-gobbling processes common at treatment plants today, to the physical and catalytic process he describes for NEWT. That change would eliminate the battle between energy costs and treatment performance that currently dominate the industry.

“Many of our materials and approaches can significantly enhance traditional large water treatment plants,” he said.

To back that claim, he offered the examples of membranes that utilize ENMs for surface self-cleaning and biofilm control, making them fouling-resistant and highly permeable, or disinfection and advanced oxidation processes that use nanocatalysts to remove microbes and pollutants that can’t be stopped otherwise.

For now, Alvarez sees the emerging NEWT as a go-to technology for providing access to clean water during emergency response or humanitarian aid and wastewater reuse at remote industrial locations. By relying heavily on solar power, energy costs will be low. The NEWT’s ability to selectively remove priority pollutants and tailor quality to an intended use will also improve the economics.

“In a way, our treatment systems will be sort of the smart phones of the water industry, allowing you to get superior service with limited infrastructure,” he said.

Soon enough, we will know if ENMs and their NEWT application will have what it takes to change the treatment industry. The consortium hopes to receive the funding necessary to become self-sufficient by teaming with water market partners in the next 10 years.

Image credit: "splash," © 2010 Luke Peterson, used under an Attribution- ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

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