Researchers at Indian Institue to Science Education and Research in Bhopal (IISER) have successfully developed organic polymers that are capable of removing highly polar organic micropollutants (POMs) from water and can render it safe for further consumption.
As per the researchers, these polymers that have been developed have already been tested for polar organic micropollutants removal at a lab scale. Large scale development of these materials will be done in collaboration with the industrial partners and it will open up a promising avenue for scavenging toxic polar organic micropollutants from water in real-time, as per the researchers. The findings of this research have already been published in the reputed and peer-reviewed journal of the American Chemical Society, ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces.
These are being called Hyper-Crosslinked Porous Organic Polymers or HPOPs which is inclusive of a teaspoon of the powder of these polymers that will be covering an internal surface area of around 1000 to 2000 m2/g which is equivalent to around 2 tennis courts.
According to Abhijit Patra, the Associate Professor at the Department of Chemistry at IISER Bhopal, the main advantages of these polymers include large-scale development using cheap and simple aromatic precursors without the requirement of any transition metal-based exotic catalysts and high thermal or hydrothermal stability.
The research team at Bhopal included PhD students Arkaprabha Giri and Tapas Kumar Dutta, Subha Biswas and Waseem Hussain. This project had been funded by the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India under the “Centre for Sustainable Treatment, Reuse and Management for Efficient, Affordable and Synergistic Solutions for water.” scheme.
Patra said that the prime concern is water contamination in the nation due to the anthropogenic waste discharge to the surface and then groundwater by various sources including domestic, agricultural, and industrial sectors. These wastes in the water contain a vast amount of organic and inorganic micropollutants and are a diverse set of analytes that are present in water, and pose a serious threat to human and aquatic lives.