Bactericidal Paper Impregnated with Silver Nanoparticles for Point-of-Use Water Treatment

Abstract

There is an urgent need for cheap point-of-use methods to purify drinking water. We describe a method to deactivate pathogenic bacteria by percolation through a paper sheet containing silver nanoparticles. The silver nanoparticles are deposited by the in situ reduction of silver nitrate on the cellulose fibers of an absorbent blotting paper sheet. The aim is to achieve inactivation of bacteria during percolation through the sheet, rather than removal of bacteria from the effluent by filtration. The silver-nanoparticle containing (AgNP) papers were tested for performance in the laboratory with respect to bacteria inactivation and silver leaching as suspensions of bacteria percolated through the paper. The AgNP sheets exhibited antibacterial properties toward suspensions of Escherichia coli and Enterococcus faecalis, with log reduction values in the effluent of over log 6 and log 3, respectively. The silver loss from the AgNP sheets was minimal, with values under 0.1 ppm (the current US EPA and WHO limit for silver in drinking water). These results show promise that percolation of bacterially contaminated water through paper embedded with silver nanoparticles could be an effective emergency water treatment.

Disinfection and removal performance for Escherichia coli and heavy metals by silver-modified zeolite in a fixed bed column

“…Silver is an effective antibacterial agent, which has been immobilized on different inorganic support materials for a wide range of antimicrobial applications including water and wastewater disinfection [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. Zeolites have been used as support materials for silver ions with studies demonstrating the effective elimination of microorganisms from aqueous media by silvermodified zeolites [1,[16][17][18][19][20][21].…”

A Review of Nanotechnology Application for Seawater Desalination Process. SOIJST Vol. 1 (1):155-179

“…Although Ag concentration that meet drinking water quality standards is not determined by WHO or other water regulating authorities, immobilized Ag can be a good alternative as disinfectant because of higher surface area to volume ratio and its tremendous antimicrobial properties (Hossain, et al, 2014). Ceramic filter and Membrane or paper impregnated Ag nanoparticles can be applied in POU (point-of-use) water treatment process in case of emergency (Dankovich TA, 2011).…”

Fe3+-saturated montmorillonite effectively deactivates bacteria in wastewater

“…Those nanomaterials include silver nanoparticles (Dankovich and Gray, 2011;Morones et al, 2005;Panáček et al, 2006), copper and copper oxide nanoparticles (Ben-Sasson et al, 2013;Meghana et al, 2015), titanium dioxide Simon-Deckers et al, 2009), carbon nanotubes (Tiraferri et al, 2011;Vecitis et al, 2010), zinc oxide (Applerot et al, 2009;Raghupathi et al, 2011), fullerenes (Lyon and Alvarez, 2008) and graphene materials Liu et al, 2012;Perreault et al, 2015;Wu et al, 2013). Among them, silverbased nanomaterials have been most widely explored owing to their antibacterial properties to a broad spectrum of microorganisms (Panáček et al, 2006).…”