Highly Efficient Water Treatment via a Wood-Based and Reusable Filter

• Published in: ACS materials letters 2020-04, Vol.2 (4), p.430-437
• Main Authors: Jiao, Miaolun, Yao, Yonggang, Chen, Chaoji, Jiang, Bo, Pastel, Glenn, Lin, Zhiwei, Wu, Qingyun, Cui, Mingjin, He, Shuaiming, Hu, Liangbing
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 2639-4979; 2639-4979
• DOI: 10.1021/acsmaterialslett.9b00488

Portable water filters are crucial to water purification for household or community scale usage and are especially popular in developing countries or remote areas without water treatment plants. However, commercial filters face many challenges, such as slow adsorption rates, limited throughput, and the use of expensive materials and sophisticated fabrication methods, hindering their wide application for improved water quality and health. Here, we report a highly efficient water filter directly derived from abundant wood material using a facile carbonization and activation process. The massive, vertically aligned channels found naturally in the carbonized wood enable the fast and high throughput water flow while the pollutants are effectively absorbed on the nanoporous channel walls with a high surface area imparted from the activation process. Therefore, as a proof-concept study, the three-dimensional (3D)-activated wood filter demonstrates a high adsorption capacity (198.64 mg g–1) and adsorption rate (99.52% in 5 min) for Methylene Blue, superior to that of commercial filters. In addition, the bulk filter can be thermally regenerated for recycled usage by a simple carbonization process. This outstanding performance, combined with the natural abundance of wood materials, facile and scalable fabrication process, and substantially lower cost, positions our 3D-activated wood filter as a highly efficient and sustainably sourced replacement for portable commercial filters, particularly for developing countries with a pressing need for clean water.