Egg whites can be transformed into a material capable of filtering microplastics from seawater

There is a way to turn your breakfast food into a new material that can be used to remove salt from the water.

Egg whites were used by the researchers to create a lightweight and porous material that can be used in many applications. Craig Arnold works with his lab to create new materials, including aerogels, for engineering applications.

He had an idea one day.

Arnold was looking at the bread in his sandwich This is the kind of structure that we need. He asked his lab group to make different bread recipes and see if they could recreate the structure he was looking for. The team kept eliminating ingredients until they found one that worked well.

Arnold said that they began with a more complex system and kept reducing until they got to the core of what it was. The structures that we needed were made from the egg whites.

When egg whites are freeze-dried and heated to 900 degrees Celsius, they create a structure of carbon fibers and sheets of Graphene. Arnold and his coauthors showed in a paper published in August that the resulting material can remove salt and microplastics from the water with 98% and 99% efficiency.

Sehmus Ozden said the egg whites worked if they were fried on the stove first or whipped. A scientist at the Aramco Research Center is Ozden, a former research associate at thePrinceton Center for Complex Materials. Ozden said that other commercially available proteins produced the same results as regular store-bought egg whites.

"Eggs are cool because we can all connect to them and they are easy to get, but you want to be careful about competing against the food cycle." The material can be produced cheaply and without affecting the food supply. A refining of the fabrication process is one of the next steps for the researchers.

It is inexpensive to produce, energy efficient to use and highly effective if this challenge can be solved. One of the cheapest materials to use for water purification is activated carbon. Ozden said that the results were better than activated carbon. This process requires only gravity to operate and doesn't require any water or energy.

Water purity is a major grand challenge, but that is not the only application for this material. He is interested in using energy storage and insulation in other ways.

There were contributions from the departments of chemical and biological engineering and geosciences at other universities. One thing to do in the lab is one thing to understand why and how. Some of the people who helped answer the why and how questions were professors. The colleagues in geosciences helped with the data.

The Institute for Chemistry of Organometallic Compounds and the NEST-Scuola Normale Superiore created theoretical simulations that showed the transformation of egg white into the aerogel.

Sehmus Ozden et al., EggProtein derived ultra lightweight hybrid monolithic aerogel for water purification, was published in materials today. There is an article in themattod.

Journal information: Materials Today