Colorful particles of plastic drift along under the surface of most waterways, from headwater streams to the Arctic Ocean. These barely visible microplastics—less than 5 mm wide—are potentially harmful to aquatic animals and plants, as well as humans. So, researchers are devising ways to remove them and to stop them at their source. Today, a team reports a two-stage device made with steel tubes and pulsing sound waves that removes most of the plastic particles from real water samples.
, that transfer energy to nearby particles, causing some of them to vibrate and move. Just think of a speaker playing loud music that shakes the ground, bouncing flecks of dust and dirt toward each other. Scientists have already been using this phenomenon to separate biological particles from liquids, such as red blood cells from plasma.
Recently, some teams have applied this approach to the separation of microplastics from samples they prepared in the lab with pure water. But this work was done with tiny volumes of water. They also used microplastics that were only tens of microns wide—smaller than the width of human hair, explains Nelum Perera, a graduate student in Piyasena's lab at New Mexico Tech.
"I read that most of the microplastics in the environment are larger than that," says Perera, who is presenting the work."So, I wanted to develop a device that could be useful for most of the sizes and could be scaled up to meet real-world goals." To accommodate higher water flow rates, Perera created a proof-of-concept device with 8-mm-wide steel tubes connected to one inlet tube and multiple outlet tubes. Then she attached a transducer to the metal tube's side. When the transducer was turned on, it generated ultrasound waves across the metal tube, applying acoustic forces onto microplastics as they passed through the system, making them easier to capture.
In initial experiments with polystyrene, polyethylene and polymethyl methacrylate microplastics, the researchers discovered that smaller particles behaved differently than the larger ones in the presence of acoustic forces. Spiked into pure water, particles of both sizes arranged along the center of the channel, exiting through the middle outlet, while clean water flowed out the surrounding outlets.
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