4 ms·
I didn't see in the article the volume of water it can filter before the sponge is saturated, and the volume of acidic water it takes to then rinse the sponge o
by TiredGuy 3y ago
I didn't see in the article the volume of water it can filter before the sponge is saturated, and the volume of acidic water it takes to then rinse the sponge of the metals.
Also, after rinsing, how easy is it to recover the rinsed metal from the acidic solution if they want to gather something like cobalt for re-use, which they imply might be something they'd want to do?
- gigatexal 3y agoThis is why I come to HN. People are already asking the hard questions before I’ve even completed the article. Can anyone answer the OP’s questions? Anyone from the study here?
- benshindel 3y agoHey! Author from the paper here. The volume of water is dependent on the mass of adsorbent used and the concentration of Pb or other metal in the water. The mg/g values given in a few of the figures/tables for each of the nanomaterial-coated sponges gives the mass of Pb per mass of adsorbent that is the "maximum capacity" for the given adsorbent. So, if there's a 20mg/g capacity, that would imply 1 gram of sponge can remediate 20mg of metal ion in water, which would be, say, 20 Liters of water at 1ppm concentration of the metal ion. It was slightly outside the scope of our research to discuss utilization of that metal ion, but it is a mostly solved engineering problem. Ideally, the sponge would be regenerated after it was full/at capacity with a metal like Co, with a small volume of water, to generate a high concentration solution of Cobalt, which could then be precipitated out as a metal or Cobalt salt using a strong base, or utilized in applications that require Cobalt in solution, or, with certain metals, incorporated into another mineral straight from solution for use in, say, a battery cathode or other material.