Institute of Geotechnics SAS
Multifunctional sustainable adsorbents for water treatment assisted with plasma technologies and for health protection from xenobiotics
Multifunkčné udržateľné adsorbenty na úpravu vody pomocou plazmových technológií a na ochranu zdravia pred xenobiotikami
| Duration: | 1.1.2024 - 31.12.2027 |
| Program: | Horizon Europe |
| Project leader: | Melnyk Inna PhD. |
| Annotation: | Contamination of drinking-water is an urgent global health concern, preferentially in rural areas, and is highly related to the poor and vulnerable population. This challenge requires a single, easy to handle and low-cost solution able to decrease the levels of pathogens, chemical and radiological hazards to tolerable levels in a single and simple pot (from a sorbent on a glass to a more powerful cold plasma technology). Furthermore, climate change, natural disasters and the actual war in Ukraine urges having available fast effective solutions to avoid the spread of waterborne epidemies and being exposed to unsafe levels of heavy metals or hazardous organic pollutants. The complexity of such contamination including organic/inorganic species, cationic/anionic species, different size and shape, etc., requires a multicomponent system and/or device, in the form of a tablet or monolith, able to tackle specifically each of these hazards at once. In addition, this multicomponent system, besides tacking the problem in water, can be prepared and/or modified to be biocompatible so that it can also be used as a dietary complement to mitigate/remove all these hazards in human body (as enterosorbent). Based on these premises, the main goal of the CLEANWATER project is the design and development of multicomponent sorbents prepared by the combination of safe materials (e.g., activated carbons, bone-chars, pectins, among others) able to eliminate these contaminants in drinking water in a single pot or in combination with cold plasma for complete destruction. Furthermore, this sorbent will be modified accordingly to be applied in human body as a dietary complement to remove these species once assimilated in the body. |
Nanostructured Amorphous Arseno-Selenides na-As-Se: on the path towards great challenging issue in contemporary nanocomposite materials science and engineering
Nanoštrukturované amorfné selenidy arzénu na-As-Se: perspektívna cesta v materiálovom výskume a inžinierstve nanokompozitných materiálov
| Duration: | 1.1.2024 - 31.12.2025 |
| Program: | Bilateral - other |
| Project leader: | Mgr. Lukáčová Bujňáková Zdenka PhD. |
| Annotation: | The project deals with development of novel multifunctional media for contemporary photonics, IR optoelectronics, telecommunication and sensing technique, as well as biomedicine based on mechanically activated nanostructured amorphous arsenic selenides, na-As-Se (nano-arseno-selenides). The coupled nanostructurization–re-amorphization effects in these substances activated by high-energy milling in dry and wet modes will be recognized in compositional domains including under-stoichiometric, stoichiometric (As3Se3) and over-stoichiometric substances. The quantum-chemical ab-initio models of covalent-network clusters in As-Se system, complemented by structural re-amorphization probes on short- and medium-range atomic ordering (employing X-ray diffraction related to the first sharp diffraction peak, XRD-FSDP) and sub-atomistic free-volume voids (employing positron annihilation spectroscopy in lifetime measuring mode (PALS) developed within the Positronics approach), allow selection the most perspective na-As-Se with optimized exploitation properties for multifunctional applications. This project is grounded on hypothesis that optimal functionality of mechanically activated glassy arseno-selenides is governed by their atomic-specific and atomic-deficient microstructure, i.e. arrangement of both atoms and atomic-deficient free-volume spaces. That is why PALS, probing free-volume imperfections in a condensed matter at the levels stretching far below experimental measuring limits of many conventional microstructural probes, complemented with atomic-sensitive XRD-FSDP method, are the best tools to through more light on the essence of this phenomenon. This collaborative research is opening novel direction in the engineering of the modern multifunctional solid-state media with predicted, guided and reliable exploitation properties, these being mechanically activated nanostructured glassy arseno-selenides in re-amorphized state – nano-arseno-selenides, na-As-Se. |
The total number of projects: 2