NSF Nanosystems Engineering Research Center for Nantechnology Enabled Water Treatment Systems (NEWT)

题目：纳米技术水处理纳米系统工程研究中心。获得安全饮用水是地球上所有生命的基本需求。这是一项与公共卫生、能源生产和可持续发展相关的重大挑战。这不仅仅是发展中国家的需求。超过4千万的美国人没有接入市政供水系统，而是依赖水井里的优质水。这些水的质量因地点而异，气候变化加剧了淡水短缺。该中心的研究成果将使人们更容易获得各种潜在来源的清洁饮用水（如水井中的地下水、盐水、微咸水或回收工业用水）。设计的模块化系统将解决从家庭规模到社区到偏远城镇的饮用水问题。这些技术还将应用于帮助人们在自然灾害期间获得饮用水。除饮用水外，该中心还将通过帮助提高水的清洁质量以进行再利用和再循环，改善石油和天然气勘探和生产作业的水“足迹”。这些工业环境中用水的环境影响将得到改善，从而节约能源和水资源。在该中心接受培训的学生将具有多学科、团队研究经验，具备将其研究成果转化为缺乏安全清洁水源的广泛利益相关者（如工业组织、政府组织和公民）所需的技能。ERC由莱斯大学领导，合作伙伴包括亚利桑那州立大学、德克萨斯大学埃尔帕索分校和耶鲁大学。该中心对纳米技术的使用将允许设计和制造多功能纳米材料，以吸附各种污染物，包括氧阴离子，总溶解固体，硝酸盐，盐，有机物，污垢，洗垢剂，病毒和微生物。这些纳米材料将被固定在包装成系统模块的膜中。模块的使用提供了目标污染物和最终用途应用能力或交付水量规模的灵活性。新型光子、电子、催化和磁性工程纳米材料（enm）将引入新的方法，将水处理从大型、化学和能源密集型过程转变为紧凑的物理和催化系统。这些创新将使多个利益相关者受益，从遭受自然灾害的农村社区和地区，到水力压裂油气场地，在这些地方，采出水的再利用可以最大限度地减少对区域环境的影响。中心的创新技术建立在严谨的基础研究之上。组件技术包括使用enm进行表面自清洁和生物膜控制的耐污、高渗透膜；使用高导电性和选择性电极去除鳞屑（二价离子）的电容性去离子；顺磁性纳米吸附剂的快速磁分离，便于重复使用用于低能耗海水淡化的纳米光子学直接太阳膜蒸馏使用纳米催化剂的消毒和高级氧化/还原；模板辅助纳米晶化控制结垢。ENM与水污染物和基材相互作用的基础研究固定、支持或恢复能源管理系统的集成单元过程；在试验台中展示的设计安全性将确保中心的系统具有弹性、经济性和高效性。

Title: A Nanosystems Engineering Research Center for Nanotechnology Enabled Water Treatment.Access to safe drinking water is a basic need for all life on the planet. It is a grand challenge linked to public health, energy production, and sustainable development. This is not just a need in the developing world. Over 40 million Americans are not connected to a municipal water system and rely on the quality of the water available from wells. The quality of this water varies with location and climate change exacerbates fresh water scarcity. The technologies that result from the research of this center will broaden access to clean drinking water with a variety of potential sources (e.g. groundwater from wells, salt water, brackish water, or recycled industrial water). The modular systems that will be designed will address drinking water from the scale of a household, to a neighborhood to a remote town. These technologies will also find application to help people get drinking water during natural disasters. In addition to drinking water, the Center will improve the water "footprint" of oil and gas exploration and production operations by helping to increase the quality of water cleanup for reuse and recycle. The environmental impact of water use in these industrial settings will be improved, saving energy and water resources. Students trained in this Center will have a multidisciplinary, team-based research experience with the skills needed to translate their research to a broad set of stakeholders (e.g., industrial organizations, governmental organizations, and citizens) that lack a secure source of clean water.The ERC is led by Rice University, with partners at Arizona State University, University of Texas-El Paso and Yale University. The Center's use of nanotechnology will allow the design and manufacture of multifunctional nanomaterials to adsorb a wide variety of pollutants including oxo-anions, total dissolved solids, nitrates, salts, organics, foulants, scalants, viruses and microbes. These nanomaterials will be immobilized in membranes that are packaged into system modules. The use of modules offers flexibility of targeted pollutant(s) and end-use application capacity or scale of delivered water rate. Novel photonic, electronic, catalytic, and magnetic engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) will introduce new approaches to transform water treatment from a large, chemical- and energy-intensive process toward compact physical and catalytic systems. These innovations will benefit multiple stakeholders, from rural communities and locations hit by natural disasters to hydraulic fracturing oil and gas sites, where reuse of produced waters minimizes regional environmental impacts. The Center's innovative technologies are founded on rigorous basic research. Component technologies include fouling-resistant, high-permeability membranes that use ENMs for surface self-cleaning and biofilm control; capacitive deionization with highly conductive and selective electrodes to remove scalants (divalent ions); rapid magnetic separation of paramagnetic nanosorbents for easy reuse; nanophotonics-enabled direct solar membrane distillation for low-energy desalination; disinfection and advanced oxidation/reduction using nanocatalysts; and template-assisted nanocrystallization for scaling control. Fundamental research on ENM interactions with water pollutants and substrate materials; integrated unit processes that immobilize, support, or recover ENMs; and safety by design demonstrated in testbeds will ensure that the Center's systems are resilient, economical, and highly efficient.