Canadian researchers find an inexpensive way to separate clean water from contaminated oil sands production

A team of researchers from the University of Waterloo has designed a new process to filter out impurities and contaminants from oil sands wastewater. What makes the new process special is the use of inexpensive resources to carry out the filtration process – sunlight and nanoparticles.

The researchers claim that the new method is far more effective and inexpensive than other conventional methods of water treatment. The new method is based on the phenomenon of photocatalysis. In this process, nanoparticles absorb light, which then has the capability to completely filter out naphthenic acids from oil sands wastewater within a couple of hours.

Naphthenic acids are not considered safe for human health and ecology. Even though other components of wastewater biodegrade over a period of time, naphthenic acids continues to stay in it. Therefore, removal of naphthenic acids from ponds and other natural water reservoirs is one of the biggest challenges for researchers and ecologists around the world.

"Conventional treatments people have tried either haven't worked or if they have worked they've been far too impractical or expensive to solve the size of the problem,” said researcher Tim Leshuk, in a press statement. “Waterloo's technology is the first step of what looks like a very practical and the green treatment method."

The energy-efficient technology developed by Canadian researchers does not make use of membrane filtering or chlorine to get rid of the contaminants, unlike traditional water treatment methods. Instead, they made use of nanoparticles exposed to sunlight. The excited nanoparticles breakdown contaminants to their individual atoms, thus removing the impurities from the water body.

The technique is inexpensive since it uses sunlight as a source of energy, and the nanoparticles can be recovered after the process and used over several other cycles of water treatment.

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