1. Fate and Transportation of Engineered Nanomaterials in Porous Media

    Support:
            National Science Foundation
    Collaborators
          Linda M. Abriola (Tufts)
          Kurt D. Pennell (Georgia Tech)

  2. Nanoscale Carbon Onion for Remediation

    Support:
            UNL Layman Award
    Collaborators
          Yongfen Lu (UNL)
          Tian C. Zhang (UNL)

  3. Virus Facilitated Heavy Metal Transport

    Support:
            UNL Reserach Council Interdisiplinary Award
    Collaborators
          Karrie Weber (UNL)

 

 

Fate and Transportation of Engineered Nanomaterials in Porous Media

Engineered Nanomaterials of Interest

  • C60 fullerene: ~300 tons /year
  • Nano-Silver: ~500 tons /year
  • Nano-TiO2: ~5000 tons/year

Research Questions

  • How will they interact with soil matrices?
  • Can their transport be modeled as colloidal particles using classic particle filtration theory?
  • How will unsaturated soil conditions impact transport, retention, and persistence in natural soils?

Findings

  • Interaction with soil surfaces is electrostatic in origin.
  • Modification of the classic filtration theory is necessary to simulate nanomaterial transport.
  • Nanomaterial transport is influenced by small-scale surface heterogeneities.

 

 

Nanoscale Carbon Onion for Remediation

Carbon onions were named based on their unique molecular structure, consisting of spherical C60 cores surrounded by onion-like nested spherical graphite layers.

Production

  • Can be produced using oxygen-depleted combustion of hydrocarbon gases in Dr. Yongfeng Lu’s Lab at UNL

Potentials

  • Orders of magnitude higher sorption capacity than traditional sorbents (e.g. active carbon)
  • Orders of magnitude cheaper than other commercially available, carbon-based nanomaterials (e.g. C60 fullerene and carbon nanotube)

Short-term Objectives

  • Characterize the size, surface chemistry, and aggregation kinetics
  • Evaluate the adsorption capacity of carbon onions for some representative contaminants
  • Evaluate their fate and transport

Long-term Goal

  • Develop carbon onion based environmental technologies for groundwater remediation and water purification
Figure 1. Carbon onion molecular structure.
Figure 2. TEM image of carbon onion. (provided by Dr. Yongfeng Lu)

 

 

Virus Facilitated Heavy Metal Transport

One of the most numerically abundant biological entities on Earth, viruses represents “nature’s nanoparticles.” Viral-like particles are abundant in aquatic, soil, and sedimentary environments, including groundwater.

Hypotheses

  • Viral surfaces will adsorb and facilitate the transport of contaminant metals in a soil/sedimentary matrix.
  • Metal-bearing virus transport can be numerically simulated to describe contaminant metal transport.

Approaches

  • Sorption and transport experiments
  • Mathematical modeling
Figure 3. TEM image of bacteriophage PRD1. The scale bar length is 100 nm. (Ryan et al., 2000)
Figure 4. Schematic of the virus facilitated metal transport.