Sand, an abundant natural resource, has been used to clean polluted water for six millennia.
Filtration using sand in its natural form is endorsed by World Health Organisation as a water purification process.
Now, Mainak Majumder of Monash University and his international team, which included researchers from Rice University in Houston, have significantly enhanced the natural filtering properties of sand by coating it with a nanomaterial called graphite oxide in their research.
The scientists changed the structure of graphite, a material found in pencils, to dramatically increase its surface area before coating coarse grains of sand.
Increasing the surface area of the sand caused a corresponding increase in the material's ability to filter contaminants.
The research, published in the ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, indicated that untreated sand became saturated after 10 minutes of filtration, while the GO-coated 'super sand' absorbed contaminants for more than 50
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