Nanoparticles for effluent and drinking water treatment
Journal Title: Indian Journal of Research in Pharmacy and Biotechnology - Year 2016, Vol 4, Issue 6
Abstract
Effluent management has become a crucial challenge due to increased population and industrial pollution in the recent times. Supply of purified drinking water has become a top priority for every country on the globe. The drinking water contaminants that can have chronic effects include chemicals (such as disinfection by-products, solvents and pesticides), radionuclides (such as radium), and minerals (such as arsenic). Examples of these chronic effects include cancer, liver or kidney problems, or reproductive difficulties. Hence, effluent treatment has become the need of the hour. Nanotechnology, which is an emerging and fast-growing technology, offers more than 1,317 nanotechnology-based products in the market. Interestingly, a few metallic nanoparticles possess outstanding antimicrobial properties, and therefore they could be used as disinfectant agents. Technically, nanoparticles are defined as particles between 1 and 100 nanometers in size. For better visualization, a DNA molecule is around 1 nm in size, while the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is around 100 nm in size. Through modern synthesis processes, several metals can be synthesized in the nanometer regime (1-100 nm). At such small size, the surface area-to-volume ratio of the metallic species is extremely high, which results in several interesting and novel material properties, which are very different compared to that of the same material in bulk size. For instance when a large piece of iron and pesticides are close to one another in water, iron transfers electrons to the pesticide, which results in the iron being dissolved in the water while the pesticide is broken down into harmless components, i.e., technically the iron is oxidized and the pesticide is reduced.However, the reaction between regular-sized iron and water is much too slow to handle the amounts of pesticide currently present in ground water. Hence, iron in the form of nanoparticles can handle larger amounts of pesticides over a shorter period of time as they drastically increase the total surface area making the reaction much faster with the same amount of iron. Similarly, silver and copper nanoparticles act as excellent antimicrobial agents that can arrest the proliferation of bacteria in water.In the full paper, the role of nanoparticles in the purification of water is discussed in detail.
Authors and Affiliations
M. J. Sandhya
Keywords
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