Researchers at Princeton School of Engineering have found a way to turn your breakfast food into a new material that cheaply removes salt and microplastics from seawater.
The researchers created an aerogel with protein, a lightweight porous material that can be used in a variety of applications, including water filtration, energy storage, sound insulation, and heat insulation. Craig Arnold, Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Susan Dod Brown and Vice President of Innovation at Princeton University, worked with his laboratory to create new materials, including aerogels, for engineering applications.
One day at the faculty meeting he came up with an idea.
“I sat there staring at the bread in the sandwich,” Arnold said. “I say to myself, this is the kind of structure we need.” So, he asked his lab team to mix carbon and make different bread recipes to see if they could reproduce the aerogel structure he was looking for. At first, they didn’t work well, so the team kept removing ingredients during testing until only egg white was left.
“We start with a more complex system,” Arnold says. “We keep decreasing, decreasing, decreasing, until we find its core. It is a protein in the protein that leads to the structure we need.”
Collected by Matexcel which provided microplastic testing service. We qualitative analysis equipment to determine the type of microplastics(MPs), and qualitative analysis equipment to determine the content, quality, etc. And also analyzed the chemical substance adhering to the surface of the microplastic.
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