In Environmental Remediation

In the contemporary world, CO₂, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), industrial and municipal effluents, hazardous organic compounds, and heavy metal ions are major contaminants that cause serious environmental problems such as global warming and hazards to human health. Aerogels are an exceptional class of porous materials with many excellent physicochemical properties such as low density, high porosity, high surface area, etc. Owing to these properties, environmental remediation has been one of the rapidly growing applications of aerogels in recent years, providing a new method to remove contaminants from the environment.

Major Applications of Aerogels in Environmental Remediation

Aerogels are promising materials for environmental remediation, which are not only beneficial for air cleaning, but also widely used in water treatment.

Air cleaning

Aerogels can be used as amine supported sorbents to capture CO₂ gas due to their numerous advantages such as low density, high porosity, and high surface area. These advantages make them great potential to remove VOCs such as benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene, which are emissions from industries or motor vehicles and cause serious environmental problems. For example, silica aerogel was indicated to be a promising sorbent to adsorb benzene with a saturation adsorption capacity of 3000 mg/g, while this value was reported only at 500 mg/g in the case of activated carbon powders.

Water treatment

Owing to their low density, high hydrophobicity and surface area, aerogels are desirable sorbents for adsorbing oil and other toxic organic compounds from water. At present, different types of hydrophobic silica aerogels have been developed, which adsorb crude oil about 3.5 times their weight, and adsorb toxic organic compounds such as ethanol, chlorobenzene, and trichloroethylene more than two times by weight, than activated carbon^[1]. In addition, aerogels are efficient materials to capture heavy metal ions in water such as chromium (Cr), copper (Cu), lead (Pb), mercury (Hg), manganese (Mn), cadmium (Cd), nickel (Ni), zinc (Zn) and iron (Fe) ions, which are known to be highly toxic and non-biodegradable for ecological environment and human being health, and may cause severe damages to the human liver, kidney and disorders in bone.

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