tz9b00488_si_001.pdf (2.13 MB)
Highly Efficient Water Treatment via a Wood-Based and Reusable Filter
journal contribution
posted on 2020-03-23, 16:33 authored by Miaolun Jiao, Yonggang Yao, Chaoji Chen, Bo Jiang, Glenn Pastel, Zhiwei Lin, Qingyun Wu, Mingjin Cui, Shuaiming He, Liangbing HuPortable water filters
are crucial to water purification for household
or community scale usage and are especially popular in developing
countries or remote areas without water treatment plants. However,
commercial filters face many challenges, such as slow adsorption rates,
limited throughput, and the use of expensive materials and sophisticated
fabrication methods, hindering their wide application for improved
water quality and health. Here, we report a highly efficient water
filter directly derived from abundant wood material using a facile
carbonization and activation process. The massive, vertically aligned
channels found naturally in the carbonized wood enable the fast and
high throughput water flow while the pollutants are effectively absorbed
on the nanoporous channel walls with a high surface area imparted
from the activation process. Therefore, as a proof-concept study,
the three-dimensional (3D)-activated wood filter demonstrates a high
adsorption capacity (198.64 mg g–1) and adsorption
rate (99.52% in 5 min) for Methylene Blue, superior to that of commercial
filters. In addition, the bulk filter can be thermally regenerated
for recycled usage by a simple carbonization process. This outstanding
performance, combined with the natural abundance of wood materials,
facile and scalable fabrication process, and substantially lower cost,
positions our 3D-activated wood filter as a highly efficient and sustainably
sourced replacement for portable commercial filters, particularly
for developing countries with a pressing need for clean water.