Microbots made from potato peel to help treat industrial effluents
PRAYAGRAJ: Soon self-propelled magnetic microbots made from discarded potato peels would help treat industrial effluents and remove harmful pollutants from them.
A microbot or micro robot is a very small robot built to do specific tasks.
A research group of Indian Institute of Information Technology-Allahabad (IIIT-A) has developed nanotechnologybased autonomously propelled magnetic microbots from potato peel for treatment of polluted water.
“As the name suggests, these microbots are microscopic particles. Generally, enormous volume of streaming waste from various industrial sectors that contains a substantial amount of toxic dyes poses a huge threat to human health and the environment. These microbots developed using biocompatible carbon dots from potato peel as integrated component are suitable for water treatment. They have the capacity to move autonomously in polluted water and degrade toxic as well carcinogenic organic dyes released from the industries,” said Amaresh Kumar Sahoo, assistant professor in the department of applied sciences, IIIT-A, who is heading the project.
Sahoo said that the idea was to develop a productive self-propelling motor using household or domestic waste for advanced application that might also bring on biocompatibility, waste management and cost effectiveness.
With this objective, Sahoo enrolled his research scholar, Saurabh Shivalkar into working on this concept.
“The microbots developed are composite of iron-based nanoparticles and carbon dots from household waste potato peel. Further, the structural integration and movement of these microbots were optimized before using them for water treatment application,” he explained.
Other scientists involved in this project include Sintu Kumar Samanta from the Department of Applied Sciences, IIITA and Md Palashuddin SK from the Department of Chemistry, Aligarh Muslim University, who helped in the understating and validating the chemistry behind the degradation. During the experimentation and optimizations, other lab members who worked with Saurabh Shivalkar included Pavan Kumar Gautam, a post-doctoral fellow, Arushi Verma, a research scholar and Krishna Maurya, an MTech student.
It took around two years to develop the proof of concept for efficient functioning of the microbots, said Sahoo.
A patent was also filed on this work in November 2020 and the work has been published recently in the prestigious Journal of Environmental Management, Elsevier.
These microbots can autonomously move vertically as well as horizontally using gas bubble propulsion in the solution. Moreover, the locomotion of bots does not need any external energy source. Therefore, these bots are highly energy efficient and proficient to convert the chemical energy to kinetic energy. These microbots have advantage over conventional techniques as the autonomous movement itself can provide intermittent mixing of pollutants in aqueous solution. This makes the bots very efficient and advanced in the applications for water treatment, the scientists said.
Magnetic properties of these microbots offer scope for easy recollection and recycling of these bots for repetitive uses.
“This will obviously reduce the overall cost of the method of dye degradation manifold low. These bots are biocompatible in nature due to the presence of carbon dots and iron-based nanoparticles, compared with previous studies used heavy metals. Also, these bots are suitable for moving in viscous fluid. Thus, the overall method provides an economically as well as ecologically viable solution for the treatment of coloured industrial effluent bearing hazardous dyes present in the water bodies,” said team member Saurabh Shivalkar.