Dr. Waye Zhang
Department of Chemical Engineering, Swansea University, UK
Wednesday 24/7/2024
Low-cost carbon electrodes and their applications: from desalination to emerging contaminants detection in water
Approximately 90% of coffee grounds are wasted, creating hundreds of thousands of tonnes of waste coffee grounds (WCG) per year. This has made WCG one of the most abundant type of food waste that remains largely unexploited by industry. WCG contains a high volume of carbon, which can be first turned into porous and conductive carbon powder through a modified carbonisation process and then mass produced into electrodes via high-volume screen-printing technique. This upcycling approach of electrode fabrication from near zero-cost and toxic WCG can contribute to the long-term societal goal of circular economy. For example, these low-cost food waste derived carbon electrodes can be applied in many environmental technologies: 1) Capacitive deionisation (CDI): CDI is novel desalination technology, which can remove a range of heavy metal contaminants from water as well ; 2) Electrochemical sensor for emerging water contaminant detection: For water utility companies, typical process to analyse these emerging water contaminants takes three days, which requires the transportation of water samples to a lab, and is also expensive (e.g. �200 per sample) and labour intensive. WCG derived sensors can reduce this time down to minutes and cost down to few pounds.
