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Newswise The Water Research Initiative of the Institute for Molecular Engineering has added a sixth research project to the original five that received funding last year.

The six projects are for research on new materials and methods to make clean water more accessible and less expensive. These seed projects involve physicists, chemists, geoscientists, environmentalists and molecular engineers working in collaborations involving scientists at the University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory, and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.

The concept was to focus initially on scientific and technical matters: applying chemistry and nano-materials to issues pertaining to water purification and sustainability, said Steven Sibener, initiative director and the Carl William Eisendrath Distinguished Service Professor in Chemistry and the James Franck Institute.

Scientists can engineer nano-materials structures built from ensembles of molecules or atoms on a scale 10 to 50 times larger than that of single molecules so that they can be tuned to meet the demands of a particular task. One such objective is water filtration.

Current filtration methods use membranes to remove salts and minerals from water. But as a result of human activity, water is contaminated by harmful organic materials and micro-organisms and these are not removed by present membrane technology, said Moshe Gottlieb, who heads the Ben-Gurion University arm of the initiative.

Mathematically modeling patterns

The newest project, involving Argonne and BGU, will benefit agriculture, green roofs, bioswales, and engineered installations for storm water management. The project builds on the work of BGU scientists, who have developed a mathematical model that accurately represents patterns of plant and root growth under desert water conditions.

Project scientists aim to expand this model for application to environments that contain two major vegetation types, such as woody plants and trees, or shrubs and grasses. The BGU model was developed in Israels Negev Desert, but it might also prove useful in more temperate environments. Chicagos green roofs, for example, also experience water scarcity.

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Institute for Molecular Engineering Pursuing Six Water Research Projects