Nanoparticle Enhanced Interfacial Solar Photothermal Water Disinfection Demonstrated in 3-D Printed Flow-Through Reactors

Abstract

Heat treatment, i.e., boiling or pasteurization, is the most widely recognized and practiced form of household water treatment. Considering recent advances in the development of light harvesting nanoparticles for solar-to-heat conversion, we envision that a nanomaterial enhanced water heating treatment system could obviate the need to use fuels or electricity to heat water by replacing the energy source with sunlight. In this study, we demonstrate that functional disinfection temperatures can be easily achieved with unconcentrated sunlight using a single layer interfacial photothermal film in direct contact with a tortuous flowing water channel. Photothermal films were fabricated by dispersing high concentrations of light harvesting nanoparticles, carbon black and Au nanorods, into a highly transparent curable polymer. Bench-scale 3-D printed reactors were employed to determine the effect of different parameters on reactor performance, such as channel height, retention time, flow rate, initial water temperature, and light intensity. Simulations demonstrate the scalability of the treatment system, predicting that a reactor footprint of 45 × 45 cm would be required for a photothermal treatment system that could produce 8 L of water per day with 8 h of sunlight at 1 Sun intensity.

Mechanisms of Escherichia coli inactivation during solar-driven photothermal disinfection

“…[11][12][13] Both materials achieved 5 log inactivation on MS2 bacteriophage in 100 min under 1 sun irradiation. 14,15 CNTs are also broadband-light-absorbing photothermal nanomaterials with exceptional photothermal conversion performance. 16,17 Compared with carbon black and Au nanorods, CNTs have high mechanical strength and easily form films, 18,19 which make them a good candidate to fabricate films with high mechanical strength and efficient photothermal conversion for advanced solar photothermal disinfection.…”

“…20 In the advanced SODIS system, the photothermal conversion materials produce much higher water temperatures and the temperature of the heating surface can approach 100 °C. 14,15 The synergy of solar radiation and photo-induced heat has been found to enhance the bactericidal efficiency, 26 which has been attributed to the over-accumulation of ROS. 26 However, the molecular mechanisms involved in ROS production and the inactivation of microorganisms in the solar-driven photothermal water disinfection system remain unclear.…”

Plasmonic photoreactors-coated plastic tubing as combined-active-and-passive antimicrobial flow sterilizer

“…9,12 The former typically involves nanostructured hydrophobic compounds to generate anti-fouling properties and trigger bacterial growth inhibition, [13][14][15] whereas the latter comprises a range of different strategies, including antibacterial polymers, proteins and peptides, 16,17 functional polymers or surfactants that lyse the microbes, [18][19][20][21][22] carbon-based materials such as graphene 23 and fullerene 24 for mechanical, photochemical, or photothermal inactivation, or metal-based nanostructures that can release metal cations as bactericides or that trigger photophysical inactivation pathways. 12,[25][26][27][28][29] Silver nanoparticles (NPs) are effective generic antibacterial agents [30][31][32][33][34] and represent the most commonly used metal-based antimicrobial coating. 12,24,27,29,35 Silver NPs were found to sustain not only light-independent antibacterial effects, such as the release of Ag + , 30,33,36 binding to bacterial surfaces, 37 permeation of bacteria cell bodies for inducing intracellular damages, 38 or synergistic enhancement of antibiotics, 39 but also light-dependent effects through plasmonic photodynamic chemotherapy (PDCT), [30][31][32] photothermal, 40 and...…”

Fused Filament Fabrication 3‐D Printing of Reactive Porous Media

“…AM is the process of joining materials to make parts from 3-D model data (International, 2015), usually layer upon layer as in fused deposition modeling (FDM)/fused filament fabrication (FFF) (Guo & Leu, 2013). 3-D printing has been widely used in aerospace, automotive, biomedical, and art fields (Ligon et al, 2017) and has been recently used for fabricating microfluidic devices (Bhattacharjee et al, 2016;Mcdonald & Whitesides, 2002;Rusling, 2018;Watson et al, 2018) and bench scale flow through reactors for water treatment (Loeb et al, 2019). The potential use of 3-D printing for fabricating geological materials for use in lab experiments has been considered for undisturbed soil samples (Bacher et al, 2015;Dal Ferro & Morari, 2015;Otten et al, 2012) and sedimentary rocks (Ishutov et al, 2015;Kong et al, 2019), where the research was focused on replicating the pore network of natural samples.…”