New water filter kills disease-causing bacteria

The technology could aid many of the almost one billion people lacking access to clean, safe drinking water. A report on the work appears in the American Chemical Society's monthly journal Nano Letters.

Most water purifiers do their jobs by trapping bacteria in tiny pores of filter material. Pushing water through those filters, however, requires electric pumps and demands lots of energy. The filters also can get clogged, so they often have to be replaced. A new material developed by Yi Cui, Ph.D., of Stanford University could avoid many deficiencies of traditional filters. For starters, it does not trap bacteria like most technologies. It kills them outright.

“The removal of bacteria and other organisms from water is very important, not only for drinking and sanitation but also in industry as there's a frequent need to replace filters due to clogging,” Cui says in the podcast. “The product we've developed could dramatically lower the cost of many filtration technologies for water as well as food, air, and pharmaceuticals, where the need to replace filters is common and very challenging.”

This podcast is available without charge at iTunes and from ACS' Web site at www.acs.org/globalchallenges.

Global Challenges/Chemistry Solutions is a series of podcasts describing some of the 21st Century's most daunting problems, and how cutting-edge research in chemistry matters in the quest for solutions. Global Challenges is the centerpiece in an alliance on sustainability between ACS and the Royal Society of Chemistry. Global Challenges is a sweeping panorama of global challenges includes dilemmas such as providing a hungry, thirsty world with ample supplies of safe food and clean water; developing alternatives to petroleum to fuel society; preserving the environment and assuring a sustainable future for our children; and improving human health.

The American Chemical Society is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. With more than 161,000 members, ACS is the world's largest scientific society and a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related research through its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.