(242a) Advancements in the Design of Porous Materials for the Adsorption of Contaminants of Emerging Concern from Water

Contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) entail a variety of compounds, including but not limited to pharmaceutical and personal care products, pesticides, endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs), and the corresponding secondary metabolites. CECs are the result of both natural processes and terrestrial anthropogenic activities like direct human waste residues, industrial effluents, runoff from agriculture and livestock, and leakage from landfills. In the case of closed volume applications, like those found human space exploration activities, the accumulation of CECs in the absence of appropriate remediation strategies is imminent due to the need for water reclamation. Numerous CECs are deemed toxic, particularly those that are metabolites of source compounds such as medicinal drugs and EDCs. Given that water is already limited for consumption, it is therefore imperative to find remediation solutions to deal with CECs. One alternative is the used of adsorbent materials as part of a string of water treatment processes that include natural attenuation, and conventional and non-conventional treatment methods. However, the effective removal of CECs via adsorption requires materials that exhibit a synergistic combination of specific surface functionalities, textural properties and hydrophobicity. Although high surface area carbon based adsorbents are ubiquitous in water treatment operations everywhere, selectivity toward CECs present in the ppm and sub-ppm range is severely constrained due to lack of specific surface interactions. Zeolite-like materials and metal organic frameworks (MOFs) on the other hand offer substantial surface designability to achieve significant adsorbate-adsorbent interactions, and yet suffer from significant hydrophilicity and/or stability problems in aqueous solution. In this talk, we will discuss strategies to overcome the aforementioned limitations via the design of nanoporous hierarchical composite adsorbents with surfaces that rely on both specific and non-specific interactions between a targeted CEC and sites based on transition metals, as well as simultaneous size exclusion and kinetic based separation principles. The discussion will also include a presentation of multi-component uptake data to cover aspects related to competitive adsorption as well as opportunities for regeneration strategies. Furthermore, the presentation will make presentation of recent multidisciplinary collaborative efforts to exploit machine learning for the screening of porous materials candidates for purification of reclaimed water in space exploration applications.