CAREER: Research and Education of Adsorption and Desorption of Air Pollutants on Engineered Nanomaterials

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"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)."0845934D. RamirezEngineered nanomaterials have unique chemical and physical properties that make them desirable for widespread applications including environmental remediation, energy conversion, catalyst support and biomedical use. Despite their benefits, questions need to be answered about the impacts of such nanomaterials on human health, safety and the environment. Principal objectives of the proposed research are to investigate the transformations of engineered nanomaterials as they interact with hazardous air pollutants in the environment and to determine the efficiency of air pollution control devices to adsorb and desorb pollutants associated with engineered nanomaterials. Systematic research methods and innovative mathematical models based on quantitative-structure activity relationships will be developed to characterize the adsorption and desorption of hazardous air pollutants on engineered nanomaterials. This research project consists of the following main tasks: (1) to characterize the adsorption of hazardous air pollutants on engineered nanomaterials including C60 fullerenes, single- and multi- wall carbon nanotubes, and silica; (2) to examine the effect of humidity and nanomaterial morphology on the atmospheric adsorption and desorption of air pollutants on nanomaterials; (3) to model single- and multi-component sorption based on quantitative-structure activity relationships; and (4) examine the effect of concentration of pollutant associated nanomaterials on their removal efficiency using filtration and adsorption systems. The proposed research plan will be one of the first efforts to evaluate the efficiency of filtration and activated carbon adsorption systems, typically used in industry, for removing specific engineered nanomaterials in the gas phase. The research described in this proposal is novel and potentially transformative in that, if successful, it would lead to new technology for the evaluation of the impacts of hazardous air pollutant-associated engineered nanomaterials on human health, safety and the environment.As a new Hispanic faculty member in the Environmental Engineering Department at Texas A&M University at Kingsville (TAMUK), a Hispanic-serving institution, the PI will recruit and mentor students from underrepresented groups, and to establish multidisciplinary research and education programs on atmospheric transformations of engineered nanomaterials at TAMUK with national and international collaborations.