Metal-organic frameworks based composites for water purification (Inhar Imaz)

ICN2 Severo Ochoa Workshop on Environmental Monitoring and Remediation Title: Metal-organic frameworks based composites for water purification Speaker: Inhar Imaz (ICN2) Abstract: Water pollution is a principal cause of health disorders worldwide. Increasing industrial activity, especially in developing countries, often involves contamination of water with soluble toxic metal-ion pollutants that readily accumulate in humans and animals. Exposure to heavy metals such as arsenic, cadmium, chromium, lead, and mercury, even at trace levels, is especially pernicious to human health. Consequently, major efforts have been devoted to the development of water-treatment methods. One promising approach for water treatment is adsorption, which has been lauded for its simplicity, versatility, cost efficiency, and effectiveness. Common adsorbents such as activated carbon, zeolites, clay minerals, and natural fibers have been studied for the adsorptive removal of heavy metal ions. However, these materials suffer from drawbacks such as limited regeneration, slow sorption kinetics, relatively low thermal or chemical stability, and limited selectivity. Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs), which are porous ordered structures exhibiting large specific surface areas, have recently garnered much attention as adsorbent materials, given their high adsorption capacity and chemical/structural tunability. Another class of material that has been widely studied as adsorbents is inorganic nanoparticles (iNPs), which exhibit high activity and specificity toward heavy-metal ions. For example, cerium oxide (CeO2) NPs have exhibited excellent adsorption capacities for the following metal ions in water. One way to mitigate the iNP-aggregation problem is to incorporate iNPs into the porous matrices of other materials. Among porous materials, MOFs have surfaced as an attractive partner for iNPs, not only to prevent iNP aggregation and to facilitate their recovery after the adsorption process but also for their remediation capabilities. Herein, we report new composite microbeads for simultaneous removal of various metals from water, which we obtained by incorporating iNPs into MOFs via a one-step spray-drying process. As iNPs, we used CeO2, and as MOFs, we used the waterstable Zr-MOFs UiO-66. We tested the resultant composite for the purification of synthetic river-water samples prep pared as mimics of two polluted rivers and of a real field sample from another polluted river. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The workshop on Environmental Monitoring and Remediation brought together leading academic scientists, researchers, scholars and industry representatives to exchange and share their experiences and results on all the aspects involved in pollutant detection, monitoring, scavenging and degradation. The workshop topics also covered the life-cycle of nanomaterials as potential pollutants and their impact on the ecosystem. This Action is held within the framework of the 2018-2021 Excelencia Severo Ochoa Programme. The event, which took place at the Casa de Convalescencia in Barcelona on December 16-17 2021, was organised by Dr Neus Bastús, CSIC Tenured Scientist in the Inorganic Nanoparticles Group, Dr Maria José Esplandiu, CSIC Scientific Researcher in the Magnetic Nanostructures Group, and Jessica Casandra Ramírez, Doctoral Student in the Magnetic Nanostructures Group. Event website: https://icn2.cat/en/severo-ochoa-work... News item about the event: icn2.cat/en/news/4799-icn2-severo-ochoa-workshop-on-environmental-monitoring-and-remediation