Doctoral themes 2023

The joint power of nanoporous carbons and natural deep eutectic solvents for sustainable water purification processes

Supervisors

Ana Sofia Mestre, asmestre@ciencias.ulisboa.pt

Isabel Marrucho, isabel.marrucho@tecnico.ulisboa.pt

Registration Institution

Instituto Superior Técnico

Project description

Water treatment improvement is mandatory to face current water quality challenges, being a focus of Sustainable Development Goals. A major challenge for water treatment (PT & World) is related with the presence of micropollutants, namely pharmaceutical compounds (PhCs), that by resisting to conventional treatments call for the need of more powerful treatment processes. Activated carbon (AC) adsorption is considered one of the best available technologies to control these contaminants. However, a more sustainable use of activated carbons can only be achieved by increasing their recycling and reuse, idealy by developing inovative in-situ regeneration strategies.

Natural deep eutectic solvents (NADES) are non-toxic, cheap and easy to prepare materials that use natural solids to prepare liquid compounds at room temperature, which can be tunned to perform an efficient extraction of PhCs (e.g. antibiotics, antipileptics, anti-inflamatory medicines, hormones) from different matrices, with the possibility to develop recovery and reutilization cycles.

The objective of this project is to develop a strategy to continuously clean and reuse GAC in-situ through the use of NADES to efficiently extract PhCs from the exhausted GACs, with the add-on of decreasing the CO₂-foot print of the overall water treatment process. Once the PhCs are captured in NADES, stategies for their extraction to the minimum volume of water for further abatments (e.g. photo- or eletro-degradation) will be researched through national (ISEP, PT) and international (CNRS, FR) collaborations. A 3-6 months stay is foreseen.

This interdisciplinary project is strongly aligned with the SUSChem and MATSoft CQE Thematic lines.

Keywords

Nanoporous carbon materials

Natural deep eutectic solvents

Adsorption and abatement

Pharmaceutical compounds