Sustainable and Rapid Water Purification at the Confined Hydrogel Interface

Abstract

Emerging organic contaminants in water matrices have challenged ecosystems and human health safety. Persulfate‐based advanced oxidation processes (PS‐AOPs) have attracted much attention as they address potential water purification challenges. However, overcoming the mass transfer constraint and the catalyst's inherent site agglomeration in the heterogeneous system remains urgent. Herein, we propose the abundant metal‐anchored loading (∼6∼8 g m−2) of alginate hydrogel membranes coupled with cross‐flow mode as an efficient strategy for water purification applications. The organic flux of the confined hydrogel interfaces sharply enlarges with the reduction of the thickness of the boundary layer via the pressure field. The normalized property of our system displayed a remarkable organic (sulfonamides) elimination rate of 4.87 × 104 mg min−1 mol−1. Furthermore, due to the fast reaction time (<1 min), cross‐flow mode only reached a meager energy cost (∼2.21 Wh m−3) under the pressure drive field. We anticipate that this finding provides insight into the novel design with ultrafast organic removal performance and low techno‐economic cost (i.e., energy operation cost, material, and reagent cost) for the field of water purification under various PS‐AOPs challenging scenarios.This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved