Rice University nanotechnology researchers have unveiled a solar-powered sterilization system that could be a boon for more than 2.5 billion people who lack adequate sanitation. The "solar steam" sterilization system uses nanomaterials to convert as much as 80 percent of the energy in sunlight into germ-killing heat.
The technology is described online in a July 8 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition. In the paper, researchers from Rice's Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP) show two ways that solar steam can be used for sterilization—one setup to clean medical instruments and another to sanitize human waste.
"Sanitation and sterilization are enormous obstacles without reliable electricity," said Rice photonics pioneer Naomi Halas, the director of LANP and lead researcher on the project, with senior co-author and Rice professor Peter Nordlander. "Solar steam's efficiency at converting sunlight directly into steam opens up new possibilities for off-grid sterilization that simply aren't available today."
In a previous study last year, Halas and colleagues showed that "solar steam" was so effective at direct conversion of solar energy into heat that it could even produce steam from ice water.
"It makes steam directly from sunlight," she said. "That means the steam forms immediately, even before the water boils."
This video is not supported by your browser at this time.Halas, Rice's Stanley C. Moore Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, professor of physics, professor of chemistry and professor of biomedical engineering, is one of the world's most-cited chemists. Her lab specializes in creating and studying light-activated particles. One of her creations, gold nanoshells, is the subject of several clinical trials for cancer treatment.
Solar steam's efficiency comes from light-harvesting nanoparticles that were created at LANP by Rice graduate student Oara Neumann, the lead author on the PNAS study. Neumann created a version of nanoshells that converts a broad spectrum of sunlight—including both visible and invisible bandwidths—directly into heat. When submerged in water and exposed to sunlight, the particles heat up so quickly they instantly vaporize water and create steam. The technology has an overall energy efficiency of 24 percent. Photovoltaic solar panels, by comparison, typically have an overall energy efficiency of around 15 percent.
When used in the autoclaves in the tests, the heat and pressure created by the steam were sufficient to kill not just living microbes but also spores and viruses. The solar steam autoclave was designed by Rice undergraduates at Rice's Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen and refined by Neumann and colleagues at LANP. In the PNAS study, standard tests for sterilization showed the solar steam autoclave could kill even the most heat-resistant microbes.
"The process is very efficient," Neumann said. "For the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation program that is sponsoring us, we needed to create a system that could handle the waste of a family of four with just two treatments per week, and the autoclave setup we reported in this paper can do that."
Halas said her team hopes to work with waste-treatment pioneer Sanivation to conduct the first field tests of the solar steam waste sterilizer at three sites in Kenya.
"Sanitation technology isn't glamorous, but it's a matter of life and death for 2.5 billion people," Halas said. "For this to really work, you need a technology that can be completely off-grid, that's not that large, that functions relatively quickly, is easy to handle and doesn't have dangerous components. Our Solar Steam system has all of that, and it's the only technology we've seen that can completely sterilize waste. I can't wait to see how it performs in the field."
Explore further: Researchers report major advance in using sunlight to produce steam without boiling water
More information: www.pnas.org/content/110/29/11677
12 hours ago Hi guys, So I'm starting to learn about magnetic fields and electrics fields, one of the equations we use is v= -L*di/dt ... I've been... Jul 28, 2013 Hi, I am trying to create a hall effect based position sensor to be attached onto a DC motor to generate feedback for position control. I am... Jul 27, 2013 Dear Experts I have this problem for a long time. I always cannot get my project done because parts are not available. I need gears, eg. Pinion... Jul 23, 2013 What magnetic field (magnitude, I know the direction) would need to be applied so I could align the particles of a neodymium membrane casting... Jul 22, 2013 I know that light curtains are generally known as an aligned collection of light beams that stop/enable a machine when such beams are blocked by a... Jul 20, 2013 I was digging a trench next to a building today so rain water would not back up to the buildings wall. Most of the material was soil but there were... Nov 19, 2012 (Phys.org)—Rice University scientists have unveiled a revolutionary new technology that uses nanoparticles to convert solar energy directly into steam. The new "solar steam" method from Rice's Laboratory ...
Jul 09, 2013 (Phys.org) —A team of researchers at Rice University has developed a solar powered autoclave based on solar energy and metal and carbon nanoparticles. In their paper published in the journal Proceedings of ...
May 05, 2011 (PhysOrg.com) -- Basic scientific curiosity paid off in unexpected ways when Rice University researchers investigating the fundamental physics of nanomaterials discovered a new technology that could dramatically ...
Mar 28, 2013 In some of the first results from a federally funded initiative to find new ways of capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from coal-fired power plants, Rice University scientists have found that CO2 can be removed ...
May 03, 2011 (PhysOrg.com) -- Rice University senior engineering students are using the sun to power an autoclave that sterilizes medical instruments and help solve a long-standing health issue for developing countries.
May 21, 2013 Rice University scientists have unveiled a robust new method for arranging metal nanoparticles in geometric patterns that can act as optical processors that transform incoming light signals into output of ...
7 hours ago Nearly doubling the efficiency of a breakthrough photovoltaic cell they created last year, UCLA researchers have developed a two-layer, see-through solar film that could be placed on windows, sunroofs, smartphone ...
10 hours ago BMW AG is showing off the production model of its new i3 electric compact that uses carbon-fiber materials to keep the weight down and improve driving performance.
12 hours ago Professor Ravi Silva of the University of Surrey's Advanced Technology Institute has identified the range of combinations of organic and inorganic materials that will underpin new 4th generation solar cell technology – ...
Jul 26, 2013 Foreign nuclear experts on Friday blasted the operator of Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, with one saying its lack of transparency over toxic water leaks showed "you don't know what you're doing".
Jul 26, 2013 In a newly released study, education researchers report that personifying energy allowed students to grapple with difficult ideas about how energy works. Contrasted with more traditional lectures and graphs, this innovative ...
Jul 25, 2013 Miles driven by U.S. motorists in light-duty vehicles are down about 5 percent since its peak in 2006, says a University of Michigan researcher.
Adjust slider to filter visible comments by rank
Display comments: newest first2.6 / 5 (5) Jul 22, 2013 "That means the steam forms immediately, even before the water boils."
Unnmmmhhhh?... even if she's making a distinction between evaporation and observable steam bubbles rising in the water column, that's questionable. Based on that definition of "forming steam", H2O at room temp and standard pressure is also "forming steam".
Drop the hype and buzzwords, stick to science.
not rated yet Jul 23, 2013 The video lacks all the meat around the bones. No details about the actual invention is presented. (Phys.org) —UCLA computer science professor Amit Sahai and a team of researchers have designed a system to encrypt software so that it only allows someone to use a program as intended while preventing any ...
Sharing on social media helps hackers sharpen "spear phishing" attacks they use to trick their way into computers, security experts said Monday.
It may seem like a stretch to envision a 3D printer in every home. However, a Michigan Technological University researcher is predicting that personal manufacturing, like personal computing before it, is ...
Nearly doubling the efficiency of a breakthrough photovoltaic cell they created last year, UCLA researchers have developed a two-layer, see-through solar film that could be placed on windows, sunroofs, smartphone ...
Scientists concerned about world hunger, dwindling resources and wasteful processes are looking more closely into alternative prospects for protein, and edible insects are of considerable interest. An Austrian ...
Scientists historically have argued that evolution proceeds through gradual development of traits. But how can incremental changes apply to the binary switch between two sexes, male or female? Researchers at Case Western ...
Astronomers have found a new way of measuring the spin in supermassive black holes, which could lead to better understanding about how they drive the growth of galaxies.
Human bodies recognize at the molecular level that not all happiness is created equal, responding in ways that can help or hinder physical health, according to new research led by Barbara L. Fredrickson, Kenan Distinguished ...
For the first time since exoplanets, or planets around stars other than the sun, were discovered almost 20 years ago, X-ray observations have detected an exoplanet passing in front of its parent star.
The GOES-R Magnetometer Engineering Development Unit made an important development in the construction of the spacecraft recently after completing a successful boom deployment test at an ATK facility in Goleta, Calif.
This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.
No comments:
Post a Comment