Industrial Partnership with WETSUS
Huib Bakker will participate in a joint research industrial partnership program (IPP) on the purification and quality control of water.
The program will be carried out in the next five years in the labs of Wetsus, Twente University, FOM-institute AMOLF, and at the Technical University of Delft. This week, FOM and WETSUS, centre of excellence for sustainable water technology, sign for the start of this program. The purpose of the program is to develop new methods of monitoring the quality of water, and to purify water. New and advanced spectroscopic methods will be developed to detect low concentrations of pathogenic particles in water. In addition, the molecular functioning of water-purifying and ion-selective membranes will be examined, using, among other methods, femtosecond nonlinear spectroscopic techniques.
Figure: Long-range locking of water molecules by ions. Particular cation and anion combinations, such as magnesium sulfate, can impede the motions of water molecules at relatively long ranges. The hydrogen-bond structure of these water molecules thus appears to be locked.
Wetsus has, together with FOM, found that water in a water bridge differs from normal water on a molecular level. Normal water and ice have energy relaxation time constants (in femto seconds) for the OH stretch vibration of 740 and 384 respectively. In the water bridge this is 630. This phenomenon can only be measured in a femtosecond mid-infrared pump-probe spectroscopy by adding heavy water (D2O) to water. These results point to a different molecular-scale organization of water in a water bridge. We are very exited about these new findings that could have many implications on how we think about water. The paper can be found in PCCP (2011), DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/c1cp22358e