PNNL

Abstract

Water, and water quality, are issues of critical importance to the future of humankind. Our water supply has been contaminated by a wide variety of industrial, military and natural sources. There is a serious need for technologies to remove toxic heavy metals and radionuclides from the world’s water supplies. Surfactant templated synthesis of mesoporous ceramics provides a versatile foundation upon which to create high efficiency environmental sorbents. These nanoporous ceramics condense a huge amount of surface area into a very small volume. These mesoporous architectures can be subsequently functionalized through molecular self-assembly. These functional mesoporous materials offer significant capabilities in terms of removal of heavy metals and radionuclides from groundwater and other liquid media. They are highly efficient sorbents, whose interfacial chemistry can be fine-tuned to selectively sequester a specific target species, such as heavy metals, tetrahedral oxometallate anions and radionuclides. Their rigid, open pore structure allows for rapid, efficient sorption kinetics. This manuscript provides an overview of the design, synthesis and performance of the sorbent materials.