{"id":209641,"date":"2025-03-24T17:16:58","date_gmt":"2025-03-24T22:16:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/3d-nanotech-blankets-offer-new-path-to-clean-drinking-water"},"modified":"2025-03-24T17:16:58","modified_gmt":"2025-03-24T22:16:58","slug":"3d-nanotech-blankets-offer-new-path-to-clean-drinking-water","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/3d-nanotech-blankets-offer-new-path-to-clean-drinking-water","title":{"rendered":"3D nanotech blankets offer new path to clean drinking water"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/3d-nanotech-blankets-offer-new-path-to-clean-drinking-water.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Researchers have developed a new material that, by harnessing the power of sunlight, can clear water of dangerous pollutants. Created through a combination of soft chemistry gels and electrospinning\u2014a technique where electrical force is applied to liquid to craft small fibers\u2014the team constructed thin fiber-like strips of titanium dioxide (TiO\u2082), a compound often utilized in solar cells, gas sensors and various self-cleaning technologies.<\/p>\n<p>Despite being a great alternative energy source, solar fuel systems that utilize TiO\u2082 nanoparticles are often power-limited because they can only undergo photocatalysis, or create <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/chemical+reactions\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">chemical reactions<\/a>, by absorbing non-visible UV light. This can cause significant challenges to implementation, including low efficiency and the need for complex filtration systems.<\/p>\n<p>Yet when researchers added copper to the material to improve this process, their new structures, called nanomats, were able to absorb enough light energy to break down harmful pollutants in air and water, said Pelagia-Iren Gouma, lead author of the study and a professor of materials science and engineering at The Ohio State University.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Researchers have developed a new material that, by harnessing the power of sunlight, can clear water of dangerous pollutants. Created through a combination of soft chemistry gels and electrospinning\u2014a technique where electrical force is applied to liquid to craft small fibers\u2014the team constructed thin fiber-like strips of titanium dioxide (TiO\u2082), a compound often utilized in [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,4,1633,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-209641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-nanotechnology","category-solar-power","category-sustainability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209641\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}