Your drinking water might get a little safer in the future, thanks to two Carleton researchers.
Chemistry professor Edward Lai and engineering professor Banu Ormeci won a $159,000 grant last week from the Canadian Water Network, a federally funded centre, to further their research into a new type of water purification.
Their technology cleans water of drugs and endocrine-disrupting compounds from human waste and pharmaceutical products, such as birth control pills. Those chemicals can usually get through conventional sewage-treatment plants and end up back in our water supply, according to Lai.
“The impact on human health is being studied more and more, so we know that [the toxic compounds] are there,” Lai said. “We know what harm they cause to the human health, as well as to the health of the ecosystem. So these compounds must be removed.”
The researchers’ technique is to create special “smart” particles that are designed to seek out and latch on to the chemicals they want removed from the water.
“These compounds, fortunately, can be targeted,” Lai said. “We apply the molecular imprinting technology to make these ‘smart particles’ that can recognize them for selective removal.”
So far, the technique seems to work in the laboratory. One of the biggest research goals, for which Lai and Ormeci needed the funding, was to figure out how to upgrade the process so it could work on an industrial scale.
Lai said Ormeci is leading an engineering challenge and they hope to have a pilot project up and running at a nearby sewage-treatment plant within two years.
Lai's current chemistry challenge is to figure out the best way to get their smart particles out of the water once they've swept up all the toxins.
Min Liu, a visiting professor from China, is helping Lai and his graduate students. She's working on improving one concept that would integrate tiny nanomagnets into the smart particles.
After the smart particles have done their work cleaning up the water, Liu said, a magnetic field could pull all the particles back out of the solution, and the toxins would be gone.
Lai said he expects their water-purification techniques will be low-cost and easy to add to the existing sewage-treatment system.