Bifunctional catalytic composite material for oxidative wastewater treatment

许多行业，如食品生产，酿酒厂和农业产生大量含有有机污染物的废水，需要在处理前去除。这需要长时间和时间密集的过程，成本很高（全球相关行业的成本为120亿英镑）。大约3 - 5%的电力用于清洁水。我们开发了一种催化复合材料，可以利用空气通过消耗水中的有机物质来清洁工业废水。其原理类似于汽车尾气净化的催化剂。与目前基于微生物的技术相比，我们的材料对温度、pH值和成分等外部条件不敏感，不需要任何能量输入或孵育时间，并且可以连续运行而无需任何再生步骤。因此，这是降低不适合其他垃圾发电技术的废水水处理成本的绝佳解决方案。我们的复合材料和产品设计将简化当前的废水处理工艺，使其更加灵活、弹性、高效和安全。废水清洁所节省的能源有可能使数百万吨二氧化碳免于进入大气，从而有助于减缓气候变化。在这个项目中，我们将优化材料，并研究其加工成创新产品。

Many industries such as food production, breweries and agriculture produce large amount of effluents that contain organic contaminants which need to be removed before disposal. This requires lengthy and time intensive processes with a large cost (£12 billion worldwide for the relevant industries). Approximately 3 -- 5% of electricity produced is used to clean water. We have developed a catalytic composite material that can utilise air in order to clean industrial wastewater by consuming the organic material within this water. The principle is analogous to a catalyst for automotive exhaust cleaning. Compared to current technologies based on microbes, our material is insensitive to the external conditions, such as temperature, pH and composition, does not require any energy input or incubation times and can continuously be operated without any regeneration step. It is therefore an excellent solution to decrease the cost of water treatment for effluents not suited for other waste-to-energy technologies. Our composite materials and product design will simplify current wastewater processes making them more flexible, resilient, efficient and safe. The energy saved for wastewater cleaning has the potential to save millions of tons of CO2 from getting into the atmosphere, thus helping to mitigate climate change. During this project we will optimise the material and investigate its processing into innovative products.