Based on years of research accumulation, Researchers at the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, have made a significant breakthrough in the separation of microsphere materials, developing fully dispersed hydrophilic-hydrophobic heterogeneous microspheres. These microspheres can be dispersed in a variety of solvents, exhibiting adsorption or desorption effects, and achieving the recovery of organic dyes from wastewater. The relevant research results were published online in the journal Nature Communications.
Organic dyes are commonly used color additives with wide applications in industry, scientific research, and daily life. Statistics show that the global production of organic dyes reaches 700,000 tons/year, with 10%-15% discharged into industrial and domestic wastewater, becoming a major source of water pollution and posing a threat to the ecological environment and public health.
"Existing wastewater treatment methods for dyes, such as coagulation-flocculation and biodegradation, can remove most organic dyes from wastewater. However, these methods have problems such as incomplete dye removal, limited applicability to dye types, and sludge produced easily causing secondary pollution." said Wang Shutao, corresponding author of the paper and researcher at the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
In recent years, with the rapid development of nanotechnology and materials science, a series of emerging materials and methods for treating dye wastewater have emerged, such as catalytic oxidation, nanofiltration, and porous particle adsorption.
The fully dispersed hydrophilic-hydrophobic heterogeneous microspheres we developed can be dispersed in many solvents without agglomeration, and can function well. For example, it can first adsorb dyes in water and then desorb dyes in oil, so that dyes can be recovered from wastewater. However, the prerequisite for such adsorption and desorption is that it must be dispersible in both water and oil, so this full dispersion performance is crucial." explained Song Yongyang, the first author of the paper and researcher at the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
In Wang Shutao's view, hydrophilic-hydrophobic heterogeneous microspheres are a promising new material for recovering organic dyes. "In the process of recovering organic dyes, only organic solvents need to be added, without the need to add eluents containing inorganic acids, bases, or salts. The added organic solvents can be easily removed from the dyes by simple distillation, avoiding the complex steps of removing inorganic acids, bases, and salts." Wang Shutao said that these materials have broad application prospects in the fields of environmental pollutant treatment, resource recovery and utilization, marine resource enrichment and extraction, and separation and analysis of complex samples in biomolecular detection.
