Feb 27, 2020
Episode 4: Toxic bromate removed from drinking water
Sophia Chen of MRS Bulletin interviews Tina Škorjanc, a PhD student at New York University in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, and her professor Dinesh Shetty at Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi, about porphyrin–based covalent organic frameworks they developed that remove the toxic substance bromate from drinking water. Read the article in Chemical Science.
Transcript
SOPHIA CHEN: Drinking water: Whether it’s out of the tap, the refrigerator, or a bottle, we expect it to be clean. Water treatment plants oblige, with a complicated sequence of filtration and purification processes. During a last purification step, the treatment plants add ozone to disinfect the water. The ozone removes odor, color, and taste, and it does this all quickly. But a potential dangerous side effect of the ozone turns harmless, naturally occurring bromine ions in the water into the toxic substance bromate. Tina Škorjanc, a PhD student at New York University in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, is…