Instant Water Cleaning Technique ‘Countless Times’ Much Better than Business Technique

According to researchers from Cardiff University, a water disinfectant made on the spot using only hydrogen and the ambient air is thousands of times more efficient than conventional commercial techniques at eliminating viruses and bacteria.

Announcing their discoveries today in the journal Nature Catalysis, the scientists said the discovery potentially modernise water treatment technology and give an unprecedented chance to supply clean water to communities that demand it most.

Utilizing a catalyst comprised of gold and palladium, their novel technique creates hydrogen peroxide, a disinfectant that is already generated on a large scale and is utilized widely.

Enhancing Hydrogen Peroxide

Each year, almost four million tonnes of hydrogen peroxide are produced in factories and then shipped to locations where it is utilized and kept. As a result, stabilizing chemicals are frequently added to the solutions throughout the production process to prevent it from degrading. However, these compounds lessen the solution’s efficacy as a disinfectant.

The addition of chlorine is another popular method for treating water; however, research has shown that chlorine can interact with naturally occurring substances in water to create chemicals that, at large amounts, can be hazardous to humans.

The efficacy and safety problems currently connected with commercial approaches would be resolved if hydrogen peroxide could be produced at the point of use.

Assessing Efficacy

The researchers compared the effectiveness of their new catalytic approach to that of commercially accessible hydrogen peroxide and chlorine in their research.

Escherichia coli was tested for each method’s capacity to kill the bacterium under the same settings, then the mechanisms involved in each method’s ability to kill the bacteria were analyzed.

The team revealed that a variety of highly reactive compounds, referred to as reactive oxygen species (ROS), were concurrently produced by the catalyst as it brought hydrogen and oxygen together to form hydrogen peroxide. The team revealed that these ROS, not hydrogen peroxide as a whole, were what caused the antibacterial and antiviral effects.

The catalyst-based technique was demonstrated to be over a hundred million times more efficient than chlorination and ten million times more powerful than a comparable quantity of industrial hydrogen peroxide in eliminating bacteria.

Additionally, compared to the other two substances, the catalyst-based technique was demonstrated to be more efficient at quickly eliminating the bacteria and viruses.

According to estimates, 2.7 billion people endure water scarcity for at minimum one month out of the year, and 785 million people have no access to clean water.

Additionally, poor sanitation, which affects 2.4 billion people worldwide, can result in lethal diarrheal diseases like cholera and typhoid fever and other water-borne infections.

Revolutionizing Water Sanitation

The co-author of the research Professor Graham Hutchings, Regius Professor of Chemistry at the Cardiff Catalysis Institute, said that the significantly improved bactericidal and virucidal operations that had been achieved by reacting hydrogen and oxygen employing their catalyst instead of utilizing commercial hydrogen peroxide or chlorination illustrated the potential for revolutionizing water sanitation technologies all over the globe.

“We now have proven one-step process where, besides the catalyst, inputs of contaminated water and electricity are the only requirements to attain disinfection,” he said.

“Crucially, this process offers the opportunity to rapidly disinfect water over timescales in which conventional methods are ineffective, while also preventing the formation of hazardous compounds and biofilms, which can help bacteria and viruses to thrive.”

Scientists from Swansea University, Lehigh University, National University of Singapore, the University of Bath, and specialists from Dwr Cyrmu Welsh Water collaborated on the study under the direction of Cardiff University’s School of Chemistry and School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

Read the original article on University of Cardiff.

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