en.Wedoany.com Reported - Chemical engineers at the University of Florida have developed a new gel-based material that can more effectively filter PFAS "forever chemicals" from water, outperforming many widely used commercial products.
PFAS are linked to health effects such as birth defects and certain cancers, but their extremely low concentrations in water make detection and separation difficult. Dr. Joshua Moon, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Florida who led the research, said this is like adding a drop of food coloring to an Olympic-sized swimming pool and then recovering it all—extremely challenging. The new material itself does not use fluorine to capture PFAS, helping to reduce fluorinated chemicals in the filtration supply chain.
Moon and doctoral student Lakshay Dhamania published their findings on June 8 in the journal Energy and Environmental Materials. Described by Moon as "molecular Velcro," the material uses charge-based design to capture PFOA, one of the most abundant PFAS species in the environment. The gel allows PFOA molecules to bind throughout the entire material, not just on the surface, thereby enhancing filtration capacity. Additionally, the gel can be reused multiple times after being rinsed with common solvents.
One of the researchers' goals is to develop PFAS filtration methods that do not rely on fluorinated materials, avoiding the release of fluorinated compounds back into the environment when the materials degrade. Moon noted that many existing materials are either ineffective or must rely on fluorinated substances to bind PFAS, whereas the gel-based adsorbent they developed works effectively without containing PFAS-like substances.
Moon's lab is currently further testing and refining this filtration method for potential applications in commercial and municipal water treatment. The long-term goal is to explore broader rules for capturing PFAS by constructing polymers with individually tunable chemical properties, particularly targeting compounds that are more difficult to remove from water than PFOA, in hopes of overcoming major challenges that commercial treatment processes struggle to address.
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