SBIR-STTR Award

With increasing global industrialization, hazardous pollutants such as pesticides, organic chemicals, and heavy metals are being produced in greater quantities by chemical, agricultural, pharmaceutical, textile, and many other industries. Since these pollutants pose serious environmental and health threats, they need to be removed from waste streams such as wastewater before it can be discharged into the environment or reused. Adsorption is the most favorable method used to remove pollutants from wastewater due to its efficiency, high adsorption capacity, and low operational cost. In this proposal, novel adsorbent materials based on biomass and industrial waste materials will be developed for wastewater treatment applications. The proposed novel adsorbent materials will offer unique and versatile high performance adsorbent materials compared with conventional adsorbent materials. The successful development of the novel adsorbent materials using biomass waste materials will increase the utilization of woody resources for value-added products from wood and other agricultural materials, improve water quality and conservation through effective wastewater treatment and reuse, and reduce environmental impacts of biomass wastes.

With increasing global industrialization hazardous pollutants such as heavy metals organic compounds and pesticides are being produced in greater quantities by chemical agricultural pharmaceutical and many other industries. Since these pollutants pose serious environmental and health threats environmental regulations require that they are removed from waste streams such as wastewater before discharging into the environment or reuse. Adsorption is the most favorable method used to remove pollutants from wastewater due to its efficiency high adsorption capacity and low operational cost. Innovative composite adsorbents based on woody biomass materials have been successfully developed in Phase I with superior adsorption performance for wastewater treatment applications. Woody biomass materials were uniquely formulated with an inorganic precursor material and then underwent an innovative activation and conversion process to produce highly porous composite adsorbents. The composite adsorbents demonstrated exceptional inorganic and organic pollutant removing capabilities for a wide variety of pollutants that were unmatched by commonly used individual adsorbents. In Phase II work will be conducted to scale up and optimize the composite adsorbent material formulation and fabrication process. A pilot production system will be built to demonstrate the concept at a larger scale. From the pilot scale data performance and economic evaluations will be performed to verify the advantages of the proposed adsorbents over traditional adsorbents. The successful development of the novel adsorbents using woody biomass will contribute to increased utilization of woody resources for value-added products from wood and other agricultural materials improve water quality and conservation through effective wastewater treatment and reuse enhance economic opportunity and quality of life for people in rural areas and improve the global competiveness of the manufacturing sector in the United States.