Gold and palladium nanoparticles purify water
He’s just 37 years old, but he’s already making a difference in the world! Now, Ivanhoe introduces a young engineer who’s creating small solutions to big problems.
We’ve seen it in the movies — polluted drinking water is a health and environmental concern. In fact, right now, 30 states need to clean up their groundwater. “They’ve been designated by the EPA as being highly contaminated, and they’ve got to do something about the contaminated water,” Michael Wong, Ph.D., a chemical engineer at Rice University in Houston, told Ivanhoe.
Dr. Wong is one of Smithsonian Magazine’s America’s Young Innovators … and for good reason. He’s trying to come up with a way to use nanoparticles to clean up our water. “Water is not just H2O. Water has all sorts of stuff in it and the stuff we don’t want, those are the things that can really hurt you,” Dr. Wong explains.
He’s using nanoparticles made out of gold and palladium — a metal related to platinum — to get rid of chemicals. One of the most common pollutants in United States groundwater is trichloroethylene, or TCE, a solvent used to degrease metals. And it can cause cancer.
“Our idea was, let’s go ahead and break it down — break it down into something that’s safer,” Dr. Wong says. “Safer chemicals that won’t hurt your body and hurt the animals and the fish and what not.”
Source: ivanhoe.com