A new filter material may be better at straining contaminants from water than the activated carbon in your faucet filter—and may be cheaper and easier to clean, to boot. If it can be developed into a successful technology, the new material might help remove from the water supply small organic molecules such as Bisphenol A (BPA), a byproduct of some plastic manufacturing that has been linked to environmental damage and health risks.
“This was pretty exciting,” says Susan Richardson, an environmental chemist at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, who was not involved in the study. “It looks very promising. I can’t see a downside yet.”
The new material was cooked up by William Dichtel, an organic chemist at Cornell University, and colleagues. It is a β-cyclodextrin polymer, meaning it is composed of long strands of repeating molecules. The basic molecular unit consists of two main pieces: cyclodextrin (shown in blue in the figure below) and a six-carbon ring called tetrafluoroterephthalonitrile (red). Cyclodextrins are sugar molecules arranged in a ring such that the sugar’s hydroxyl groups are perpendicular to the plane of the ring. Their binding power has been exploited before, for example, to trap smelly molecules in the odor-neutralizing spray known as Febreeze. To create the filter material, scientist heated the two components in a solution of potassium carbonate and tetrahydrofuran to link the two types of molecules together in stiff chains and creating a porous 3D lattice.
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