IISER Bhopal researchers develop Porous Organic Polymers to remove micropollutants from water

The Indian Institute of Science Education and Research at Bhopal (IISER) has developed organic polymers that can remove highly polar organic micropollutants (POMs) from water, making it safe for consumption.

These polymers have already been tested for polar organic micropollutants removal at a laboratory scale.

Large-scale fabrication of these materials in collaboration with industrial partners is expected to open up a promising avenue for real-time scavenging of toxic polar organic micropollutants from water.

Called ‘Hyper-crosslinked Porous Organic Polymers’ (HPOPs), a teaspoon of the powder of these polymers will cover an internal surface area of 1,000-2,000 m2/g, which is close to 10 tennis courts.

The research was led by Dr Abhijit Patra, Associate Professor, Department of Chemistry, IISER Bhopal at the Functional Research Institute.

“In India, the prime concern is water contamination due to anthropogenic waste discharged to surface and groundwater by domestic, agricultural, and industrial sectors. These wastes contain large numbers of organic/inorganic micropollutants. Organic micropollutants are a diverse set of ‘analytes’ whose presence in water, even in trace amounts, pose a serious threat to human health and aquatic lives,” said Dr Patra.

“A process called ‘Sorption’ is one of the most energy-efficient techniques to purify water from organic micropollutants. However, commonly-used carbonaceous adsorbents possess several bottlenecks such as slow uptake rate and tedious regeneration process. Therefore, we need efficient adsorbent materials that can not only scavenge highly polar organic micropollutants (POMs) from water rapidly, but also can be synthesised easily on a large-scale through simple fabrication techniques. This was the problem the IISER Bhopal researchers at Functional Materials Laboratory set out to tackle,” he added.

The Team comprised Arkaprabha Giri, Ph.D. student, Department of Chemistry, IISER Bhopal, Subha Biswas, former BS-MS student of Department of Chemistry, IISER Bhopal, currently, pursuing Ph.D. at IISc Bangalore, Dr M D Waseem Hussain, former Ph.D. student of Department of Chemistry, IISER Bhopal, currently, pursuing post-doctoral research at Hanyang University, South Korea, Tapas Kumar Dutta, Ph.D. student, Department of Chemistry, IISER Bhopal, and Dr Abhijit Patra.

This project was funded by the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India, under ‘Centre for Sustainable Treatment, Reuse and Management for Efficient, Affordable and Synergistic solutions for Water’ (WATER-IC for SUTRAM of EASY WATER) initiative.

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