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

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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.