“It would happen essentially for free, and because the oxygen is already in the water, it’s the closest you could get to a chemical-free oxidation.” “What if we could use platinum in water treatment to oxidize contaminants?” he said. Eventually, after a year of experimenting, the idea came to him while riding his bike home from Stanford’s campus. Ultimately, their hope was to find an impactful application for their work. “We knew we could oxidize certain things, but we didn’t have a clear application in mind for this catalyst,” McCurry said. For a while, McCurry and his team of researchers used platinum to oxidize different pharmaceuticals as a matter of experimentation. While it’s a potent oxidant from a thermodynamic perspective, McCurry said, the reaction is slow.
There are about eight milligrams per liter of dissolved oxygen in water, McCurry said.
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“It was really exciting to me,” McCurry said, “because it’s always been frustrating in water treatment that water is full of oxygen, but it doesn’t really do anything.” Not only is it one of the few oxidants that is non-toxic, but it can utilize the oxygen in water to catalyze a reaction abiotically (without the use of microbes).” “The TA was going through a list of oxidants used by synthetic chemists and platinum catalysts caught my eye.
McCurry recalled learning about oxidants used for synthesizing molecules in an organic chemistry course he took while he was a graduate student at Stanford University. Details are available in the material cited. The illustration is used to simplify the presentation of the multiple reactions occurring and which are balanced. Note: The reaction scheme shown appears not to be balanced. Harmful aldehydes ( found in treated wastewater can be transformed to carboxylic acids by using the existing oxygen found in water and platinum as a catalyst to speed up the reaction. They are also generally toxic to humans, meaning that their long-term consumption could result in a variety of chronic and life-threatening illnesses such as cancer.Ĭatalytic oxidation of organic pollutants in water, without electrochemistry, addition of electron-accepting oxidant chemicals, or photochemistry, has not been sustainably demonstrated to date, McCurry said. Aldehydes are chemical compounds characterized by a carbon atom that shares a double bond with an oxygen atom, a single bond with a hydrogen atom, and a single bond with another atom or group of atoms. There’s still a tiny amount of organic carbon detectable and these carbon atoms could be attached to molecules that are very toxic or completely innocent.” This has perplexed people for years, he said, particularly because the carbon is able to make it through so many treatment layers and barriers.Ī study conducted by UC Berkeley researcher David Sedlak revealed that “ one-third to one half” of these molecules are present in the form of aldehydes, McCurry said. When wastewater is recycled, McCurry said, the resulting water is “very pure, but not 100 percent pure. Platinum, the same metal used in catalytic converters to clean up air pollutants in car exhaust, can serve as a catalyst, said Dan McCurry, assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering, speeding up oxidation to transform once-toxic aldehydes into harmless carboxylic acids. In research published in Environmental Science & Technology, USC Viterbi School of Engineering researchers introduce platinum to help clean even the most stubborn toxins from wastewater. Toxic to humans, aldehydes will be at the top of the list of regulated byproducts in forthcoming reuse regulations, USC researchers believe, and require sustainable methodology to be removed from our drinking water. One group of these chemicals, aldehydes, are known to stubbornly persist through treatment.
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Platinum has set a new “gold standard” in jewelry, and now it’s about to upscale the quality of your water.Īs wastewater treatment for potable – drinkable – reuse becomes a more viable and popular option to address water shortages, the question of what harmful byproducts might form in treatment and how to address them looms large. A broken piece of a platinum catalytic converter.
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