Your breakfast food can be transformed into a novel substance that can easily remove salt and microplastics from seawater, according to Princeton Engineering researchers.
Egg whites were utilized by the researchers to make an aerogel.
This porous, lightweight material has a wide range of uses.
That includes sound and thermal insulation, energy storage, and water purification.
“I was sitting there, staring at the bread in my sandwich,” said Arnold. “And I thought to myself. This is exactly the kind of structure that we need.
So he asked his lab group to make different bread recipes mixed with carbon to see if they could recreate the aerogel structure he was looking for.
None of them worked quite right initially, so the team kept eliminating ingredients as they tested until, eventually, only egg whites remained.
“We started with a more complex system,” Arnold said, “and we just kept reducing, reducing, reducing until we got to the core of what it was. It was the proteins in the egg whites that were leading to the structures that we needed.”
Egg whites to remove microplastics
A sophisticated system of nearly pure protein makes up egg whites.
They produce a structure of connected sheets of graphene and carbon fibers when freeze-dried and heated to 900 degrees Celsius in an atmosphere without oxygen.
Arnold and his coauthors demonstrated the effectiveness of the final material in removing salt and microplastics from saltwater in a work that was published on August 24 in Materials Today.
Sehmus Ozden, the first author of the study, stated that “the egg whites even worked if they were beaten or first fried on the stove.”
Ozden is a scientist at the Aramco Research Center and a former postdoctoral research associate at the Princeton Center for Complex Materials.
In the first studies, standard store-bought egg whites were employed, but Ozden noted that other comparable commercially available proteins also generated the same outcomes.
Microplastics can be filtered better by egg whites than activated carbon
The material will have significant advantages if this problem can be resolved because it is cheap to produce, energy-efficient, and extremely effective.
One of the least expensive materials used for water treatment is activated carbon.
Our outcomes are significantly better when compared to activated carbon, according to Ozden.
This filtration method uses only gravity and no water waste, in contrast, to reverse osmosis, which operates with significant energy input and excess water.
Although Arnold considers water purity to be a “huge great problem,” there are other possible uses for this substance.
He is also looking into further applications for insulation and energy storage.
The geosciences department at Princeton and other institutions contributed to the research, as did the chemical and biological engineering departments.
Making something in a lab is one thing, but knowing why and how something works is quite another, according to Arnold.
Professors Rodney Priestley and A. James Link from the departments of chemical and biological engineering worked with us to uncover the molecular basis of the change of the egg white proteins.
This collaboration helped us to address the why and how concerns.
Measurements of water filtration were assisted by geosciences colleagues from Princeton.
Theoretical simulations developed by Susanna Monti of the Institute for Chemistry of Organometallic Compounds and Valentina Tozzi of the Instituto Nanoscience and NEST-Scuola Normale Superiore demonstrated the conversion of egg white proteins into the aerogel.
Source: Princeton university
