New catalysts for wastewater treatment

The scientists of the Tomsk Scientific Center of the SB RAS have developed a new cost-effective method to produce a highly effective catalyst from waste ferroalloys by impregnation with carbon nitride. Filters made from this material serve several times longer than their analogs. The results of this research were reported in two high-ranking journals, such as Ceramics International and Materials Letters .

The main trends in the development of the modern industry are waste-free production and environmental friendliness. The Research Department of Structural Macrokinetics (TSC SB RAS), in cooperation with Tomsk State University, is working on obtaining advanced materials for neutralizing harmful chemicals.

In Russia, there are several multi-tonnage complex ferroalloys factories, which every month produce 50-100 tons of fractional dust captured by cyclone filters," says Konstantin Bolgaru, head of the Laboratory of new metallurgical processes. Such substandard products from ferrosilicoaluminum production get a second life, becoming valuable, ready-to-use fine-dispersed raw materials (not requiring preliminary milling) for producing porous ceramics by the self-propagating high-temperature synthesis method.

If in 2020 the scientific team led by Konstantin Aleksandrovich managed to achieve an increased strength of the products up to 10 times, the breakthrough result of this year was the ability to control the pore size in the material obtained. In cooperation with Lydia Skvortsova, associate professor (TSU, Department of Analytical Chemistry), we were able to show the effectiveness of the impregnation of the new porous material with active particles of carbon nitride to initiate chemical reactions in the visible spectrum in daylight.

The obtained catalysts have shown high efficiency in purifying water from chemically harmful substances and are promising for solving environmental problems. An important advantage of the new catalyst is its cost-efficiency. There is no need to buy raw materials for its production, and it does not contain any expensive elements. Companies that are interested in further processing of fractional dust produced from complex ferroalloys have already shown an interest in the scientists development.