Photocatalytic TiO₂ Micromotors for Removal of Microplastics and Suspended Matter

Abstract

Environmental contamination is a major global challenge and the effects of contamination are found in most habitats. In recent times, the pollution by microplastics has come to the global attention and their removal displays an extraordinary challenge with no reasonable solutions presented so far. One of the new technologies holding many promises for environmental remediation on the microscale are self-propelled micromotors. They present several properties that are of academic and technical interest, such as the ability to overcome the diffusion limitation in catalytic processes and their phoretic interaction with their environment. Here, we present two novel strategies for the elimination of microplastics using photocatalytic Au@Ni@TiO 2-based micromotors. We show that individual catalytic particles as well as assembled chains show excellent collection and removal of suspended matter and microplastics from natural water samples. File list (2) download file view on ChemRxiv LLW_Microplastics Manuscript.pdf (1.00 MiB) download file view on ChemRxiv ESI.pdf (726.69 KiB) download file view on ChemRxiv ESI.pdf (726.69 KiB)

Tailoring Metal/TiO2 Interface to Influence Motion of Light‐Activated Janus Micromotors

“…Additionally, high available surface area would make these cluster micromotors more suitable for higher quantity cargo loading or even the codelivery of two or more cargo as compared to monodispersed micromotors. This notation would be significant for future applications of light‐powered micromotors as capture agents for toxic compounds or biomedicine studies …”

“…This notation would be significant for future applications of light-powered micromotors as capture agents for toxic compounds or biomedicine studies. [34]…”

Water Purification and Microplastics Removal Using Magnetic Polyoxometalate‐Supported Ionic Liquid Phases (magPOM‐SILPs)

“…In sum, PS microplastics removal by magnetic particle attachment could provide ameans of treating larger volumes of water which are not amenable to classical filtration. [21] Some of our previous research has confirmed the bactericidal properties of POM-ILs, [10,12,25] therefore we hypothesized that magPOM-SILP 2 would be able to purify water heavily contaminated with bacteria. Thea ntibacterial water purification properties of the magPOM-SILPs were tested against gram-negative E. coli and gram-positive B. subtilis.…”

“…[20] Recently,ground-breaking studies reported the use of light-driven magnetic microswimmers for the collection and removal of microplastics from water. [21] Herein, we target multi-pollutant removal based on coreshell particles composed of as uperparamagnetic iron oxide (Fe 2 O 3 ,h ematite) core encased in ap orous silica shell. [22,23] We hypothesized that this architecture enables magnetic removal and at the same time stable POM-IL surfaceanchoring.W ed emonstrate that the resulting magnetic POM-SILP (magPOM-SILP) composite effectively binds organic, inorganic,m icrobial, and microplastic pollutants from water, and can easily be recovered using ap ermanent magnet.…”

Self-Propelled Janus Microdimer Swimmers under a Rotating Magnetic Field

“…Micro-/nanoswimmers that can convert various types of energy into kinetic energy overcoming viscous drag forces and thermal fluctuations have demonstrated different tasks in various environments [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]. Recent strides in nanotechnology have enabled researchers to develop micro-and nanorobot systems to perform great potential in the fields of drug delivery [10][11][12][13][14][15], biosensing [16,17], self-assembly [18][19][20], micro-manipulation [21][22][23], environmental detection and remediation [24][25][26][27][28] and super-resolution optical imaging [29,30]. However, rapid and accurate motion in low Reynolds number environments requires new specialized techniques.…”