Egg Whites Remove Salt & Microplastics from Seawater with 99% Efficiency

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Egg Whites Remove Salt & Microplastics from Seawater with 99% Efficiency

Egg whites remove salt and microplastics from seawater with 99% efficiency

[July 16, 2023: Staff Writer, The Brighter Side of News]

The material is an aerogel, a lightweight and porous material that can be used in many types of applications, including water filtration. (CREDIT: Creative Commons)

Princeton Engineering researchers have made a significant breakthrough in the development of a new material that can cheaply remove salt and microplastics from seawater using egg whites. The material is an aerogel, a lightweight and porous material that can be used in many types of applications, including water filtration, energy storage, and sound and thermal insulation.

Craig Arnold, the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and vice dean of innovation at Princeton, leads the team in creating new materials for engineering applications, including aerogels.

The breakthrough came during a faculty meeting, where Arnold was sitting, staring at his sandwich's bread, and had an idea. He asked his lab group to create different bread recipes mixed with carbon to see if they could recreate the aerogel structure he was looking for. After several failed attempts, the team kept eliminating ingredients until only egg whites remained, creating the structure they needed.

The egg whites are a complex system of almost pure protein, which when freeze-dried and heated to 900 degrees Celsius in an environment without oxygen, create a structure of interconnected strands of carbon fibers and sheets of graphene. In a recent paper published in Materials Today, Arnold and his co-authors showed that the resulting material can remove salt and microplastics from seawater with 98% and 99% efficiency, respectively.

The material's significant benefits include its inexpensiveness to produce, energy efficiency to use, and high effectiveness. Compared with reverse osmosis, which requires significant energy input and excess water for operation, this filtration process requires only gravity to operate and wastes no water. The material's potential applications also include energy storage and insulation.

The researchers caution against competing against the food cycle, but because other proteins also worked, the material can potentially be produced in large quantities relatively cheaply without impacting the food supply. The next step for the researchers is to refine the fabrication process so it can be used in water purification on a larger scale.

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