Issue 20, 2019

Nanocarbon materials in water disinfection: state-of-the-art and future directions

Abstract

Water disinfection practices are critical for supplying safe drinking water. Existing water disinfection methods come with various drawbacks, calling for alternative or complementary solutions. Nanocarbon materials (NCMs) offer unique advantages for water disinfection owing to their high antimicrobial activity, often low environmental/human toxicity, and tunable physicochemical properties. Nevertheless, it is a challenge to assess the research progress made so far due to the structure and property diversity in NCMs as well as their different targeted applications. Because of these, here we provide a broad outline of this emerging field in three parts. First, we introduce the antimicrobial activities of the different types of NCMs, including fullerenes, nanodiamonds, carbon (nano)dots, carbon nanotubes, and graphene-family materials. Next, we discuss the current status in applying these NCMs for different water disinfection problems, especially as hydrogel filters, filtration membranes, recyclable aggregates, and electrochemical devices. We also introduce the use of NCMs in photocatalysts for photocatalytic water disinfection. Lastly, we put forward the key hurdles of the field that hamper the realization of the practical applications and propose possible directions for future investigations to address those. We hope that this minireview will encourage researchers to tackle these challenges and innovate NCM-based water disinfection platforms in the near future.

Graphical abstract: Nanocarbon materials in water disinfection: state-of-the-art and future directions

Article information

Article type
Minireview
Submitted
06 Mar 2019
Accepted
16 Apr 2019
First published
18 Apr 2019

Nanoscale, 2019,11, 9819-9839

Nanocarbon materials in water disinfection: state-of-the-art and future directions

L. Wang, Z. Yuan, H. E. Karahan, Y. Wang, X. Sui, F. Liu and Y. Chen, Nanoscale, 2019, 11, 9819 DOI: 10.1039/C9NR02007A

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