Development of Porous Soft Materials for Detection and Removal of Trace Pollutants in Water
Postdoctoral Fellow (Furukawa Lab)
Zaoming Wang
Zaoming Wang
Dr Zaoming Wang is a postdoctoral fellow in Prof Shuhei Furukawa’s lab at iCeMS. His research focuses on developing processable porous soft materials based on the use of metal-organic polyhedra (MOPs). In this study, he and his collaborators developed a composite membrane material containing a continuous porous network capable of simultaneously detecting and removing trace-level contaminants from water.

Please share with us the significance of your manuscript in terms of its research achievements, impact, or uniqueness.

The quality of daily water sources has become a major concern due to the impact of anthropogenic activities, which has led to the persistent presence of toxic chemicals. Increasingly, new compounds are being detected in water at low concentration levels, posing significant environmental threats and risks to human safety. There is strong demand in both academia and industry for efficient methods and materials capable of detecting and removing these emerging pollutants. Microporous materials with precise pore structures are the best option for achieving selective removal of pollutant chemicals due to the possibility of matching the pore size with the target molecules. However, despite extensiveefforts to develop ideal microporous materials for water purification, it is challenging to harness processability for their implementation and coupling with water-treatment technologies while maintaining designable porosity for selectively removing pollutants even at low concentrations.
In this study, we developed a composite membrane system that can simultaneously detect and remove trace-level pollutants in environmental water. This is achieved by in situ constructing a continuous network of interconnected metal-organic polyhedra (MOP) within the processable polymer matrix. Both the intrinsic MOP cavities and extrinsic pores between the linked MOPs can be fine-tuned to selectively adsorb molecules in water even below 1 ppb level. Moreover, the membrane configuration allows for its easy implementation in real water-treatment workflows compared to the use of dispersed adsorbents.
Please tell us what was the most gratifying or inspiring moment for you during this research project.
This work was conducted in collaboration with many researchers from different fields. In particular, Dr Idaira Pacheco-Fernández, the environmental scientist, played a crucial role by discovering the value of our membrane materials in water treatment. The first discussion occurred after I presented our membrane fabrication process during a group meeting. At that time, my focus was to realize the formation of a continuous pore network within the polymer matrices without considering its practical applications. Then Idaira came to me and suggested that it could be a perfect candidate for pollutant extraction from water, so we decided to have a trial. Since the first experiments, our membranes outperformed all other conventional membrane systems in the aspects of stability, pollutant selectivity and adsorption capacity. I cannot describe how excited we were about the results we obtained. All the theoretical expectations and hypotheses we had about the membrane design worked whenever new experiments in the water analysis were made. In the end, it was a win-win because I was able to find the useful application of the membrane while Idaria could also find a material that could meet all the requirements for the challenges she was facing for water monitoring. After that, we were just dedicated to this research, keeping discussions and combining our knowledge and skills, which turned out to be a good work we are super proud of.
Please tell us about the biggest challenge or problem you experienced while conducting your research. How did you overcome it?
The biggest challenge arose when we tried to finalize this work into the manuscript, in which Idaira and I had to fuse our different ways of thinking. In the beginning, we were writing from the usual perspective of material design with an emphasis on the construction of new membrane configurations. In our mind, the design of the membrane might be the main novelty of our work. However, this way of writing turned out to be misleading and confused people about the real information we wanted to convey to the public. This is because the membrane configuration could not be proven without all the water treatment experiments. At this point, we realized that both the material design and application should be interconnected instead of presenting them separately. We spent a lot of time sitting down, discussing our thoughts, rewriting, discussing and rewriting again. I do not think I can count how many online meetings we had and how many versions of manuscripts we wrote together. But this helped us to understand more about each other’s ways of thinking. Finally, a completely different story from the environmental viewpoint was put forward to appeal to both material and environmental science communities. We couldn't be more satisfied with the outcome!
Would you consider this work to be a turning point in your overall research direction? If so, how has your research direction changed as a result of this work?
Most of my previous study was focusing on the development of porous soft materials with controlled structures. During the peer review, I was frequently asked about what these materials could be used for. This work is my first time being capable of showcasing the practical application based on the full understanding and controllability of the structure of the porous materials. I believe that the accumulation of fundamental research is very important to guide the implementation of created materials for further use. Indeed, this study proves that the design of materials was made along with the development of applications. In the future, I will continue to design interesting porous soft materials with a focus on their structure-property relationship study.
Please describe the current situation of your career. What is your current position? How has the knowledge and experience gained at iCeMS influencing your career?
I am still working as a postdoc in Shuhei’s group at iCeMS, where I have been doing research for 6 years since I was a PhD student. I really appreciate the opportunity to study here, being able to meet and talk with different people of various countries and research fields. I have learned from them how to conduct good research, think scientifically, and collaborate with people as a team. In particular, as I mentioned above, this work cannot be done without the interdisciplinary collaboration of researchers. It is important to not only focus on the study itself but also share our research with other people from different fields. New ideas and research topics may unexpectedly come up and can only be achieved by gathering the knowledge and skills of all of us. Just like the title of this work “pore-networked membranes……”, we are networking both the pores in the materials and people of different backgrounds in the study. This experience will always motivate me to be open to talking, sharing knowledge, and collaborating with other people.
Paper information
"Pore-networked membrane using linked metal-organic polyhedra for trace-level pollutant removal and detection in environmental water"
Authors: Zaoming Wang, Idaira Pacheco-Fernández, James E. Carpenter, Takuma Aoyama, Guoji Huang, Ali Pournaghshband Isfahani, Behnam Ghalei, Easan Sivaniah, Kenji Urayama, Yamil J. Colón, Shuhei Furukawa
Published: August 2024