Environmental Exploration of Ultra-Dense Nanobubbles: Rethinking Sustainability

Abstract

Nanobubbles are nanoscopic gaseous domains than can exist on solid surfaces or in bulk liquids. They have attracted significant attention in the last decade due to their long-time (meta)stability and ready potential for real-world applications, especially in environmental engineering and more sustainable ecosystems, water treatment, irrigation, and crop growth. After reviewing important nano-bubble science and activity, with some of the latest promising results in agriculture, we point out important directions in applications of nano-bubble phenomena for boosting sustainability, with viewpoints on how to revolutionise best-practice environmental and green sustainability, taking into account economic drivers and impacts. More specifically, it is pointed out how nanobubbles may be used as delivery vehicles, or “nano-carriers”, for nutrients or other agents to specific targets in a variety of ecosystems of environmental relevance, and how core this is to realising a vision of ultra-dense NBs in shaping a positive and lasting impact on ecosystems and our natural environment.

Characteristics of Ultrafine Bubbles (Bulk Nanobubbles) and Their Application to Particle-Related Technology

“…The advantages of ultrasonic atomization separation include simple operation, maintenance-free, and suitability for heat sensitive materials. Ultrafine bubbles water was used as a solvent to improve the enrichment performance using ultrasonic atomization (Yasuda et al, 2020b;2022). The ethanol concentration in the collected mist with ultrafine bubbles was higher than that without ultrafine bubbles (Yasuda et al, 2020b).…”

“…Thus, ultrafine bubbles have various interesting properties, such as a very long lifetime in liquid, a charged surface, and controllable bubble concentration using ultrasound. Therefore, they have been applied in many fields, including water treatment, medicine, and the food industry (English, 2022). This review explains the fundamental and ultrasonic characteristics of ultrafine bubbles and describes their applications to particle-related technologies.…”

Nanobubbles in water and wastewater treatment systems: Small bubbles making big difference

“…Adopted from Batagoda et al (2019). (B) Comparison between conventional and nanobubble-assisted aeration in terms of their capital, operational and management costs at different treatment levels (English, 2022).…”

From Molecular- to Plant-scale Computational-engineering Design: Applied Training Spanning Scales

“…identifying by molecular modelling the spinodal-decomposition compositions and conditions of methane in water (with silica "dirt" particles entrained in the wet-gas flow often serving as sites for heterogeneous nucleation of clathrate-hydrate nano-crystallites atop). This was done by means of a DL-POLY-based [13] molecular simulation of methane-water-hydrate interfaces with a simulation box capable of accommodating up to 12-15 unit cells of sI methane hydrate [12] -see Figure 3.…”