Safe drinking water is critical to human existence and is also included in the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. At the same time, WHO ( World Health Organization) and UNICEF (United Nation Children’s Fund) addressed the same problem in the 2019 report, stating that 2.2 Billion people around the globe lack access to safe drinking water. The easiest way to bring clean drinking water within everyone’s reach is to desalinate Seawater through evaporation and then provide a concentration of steam. However, as of now, there are no efficient materials to do this in large quantities. In recent years, researchers have increasingly become obsessed with finding such new material that can help solve this problem.
Recent research has brought a new material that might bring an end to the problem of access to water in the future. The study states that Titanium dioxide nanoparticles decorated by gold absorb around 96 percent of the solar spectrum and convert it to heat. This is extremely encouraging news for Nanomaterials Market as the material has the ability to speed up the evaporation process in desalination plants by 2.5 times and can also track hazardous molecules and compounds simultaneously.
The new material is innovative and novel and can be used as a nano-heater for water evaporation. Further, it can also be used as an optical detector in sensor systems tracking the slightest traces of different substances in water. Such properties can also come to be used for micro-fluid biomedical systems, environmental monitoring of pollutants, viruses in water, lab-on-chips, and antibiotics.
The technology was made with the help of laser radiation. The crystalline titanium dioxide became amorphous after the radiation and acquired strong and broadband light absorption properties. Embedding and doping gold nanoclusters on the material facilitated visible light absorption. Initially, the team used the feature with solar energy; however, they felt that the amorphous structure nanoparticles present in the active layer of solar cells would turn absorbed solar energy into heat instead of electricity. Eventually, they settled on using it as a nano heater in the desalination tank.
The approach was developed through a straightforward and environment friendly technology of laser ablation. Titanium dioxide nanopowders were used in a liquid containing gold ions, and then the mixture was irradiated with laser pulses of the visible spectrum. The advantage of the method is that it does not need any expensive equipment or hazardous chemicals. Moreover, it can be easily optimized to synthesize unique nanomaterial at a gram per hour rate.
The development of this new material pay paved the way for other researchers to develop innovative ideas that could help the governments and the world tackle the problem of clean drinking water and its availability.