From cleaner water to the origins of life: Advancements in water research

Every year on March 22, the United Nations observes World Water Day, highlighting the crucial human need for access to clean water and the global challenges we face in securing that access. According to the United Nations, currently 2.2 billion people live without access to safely managed drinking water services.

Last year, Prof. Junhong Chen of the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) took a leading role in the unprecedented Chicago-based Great Lakes ReNEW coalition, which has a central mission of recycling used water to create a new clean water resource, as well as using the contaminants to build clean energy batteries.

Other researchers at UChicago PME are working on a range of research projects related to water, from designing components for batteries that don’t use the harmful pollutants known as PFAS, to developing better membrane technology to decontaminate water, to examining the connection between water and the very origin of life on Earth.

Learn more about the latest advances at UChicago PME and our partner organizations:

Next-gen batteries without “forever chemicals”

Demand for batteries is on the rise for EVs and the grid-level energy storage needed to transition the planet off fossil fuels. But more batteries will mean more of a dangerous suite of materials used to build them: per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as PFAS or “forever chemicals.”

Asst. Prof. Chibueze Amanchukwu at UChicago PME wants to flip that script. In two recent papers, his research team designed two new families of PFAS-free solvents that make ideal components for next-generation batteries. The goal is to get ahead of PFAS pollution, giving future researchers a safe but powerful suite of chemicals to explore when designing batteries, turning “forever chemicals” into “never chemicals.”

• Read more about designing ideal components for next-generation batteries that won't harm the water supply

Beyond ‘one pore at a time’

Nanoporous membranes with atomic-scale holes smaller than one-billionth of a meter have powerful potential for decontaminating polluted water, pulling valuable metal ions from the water, or for osmotic power generators. But these exciting applications have been limited in part by the tedious process of tunneling individual sub-nanometer pores one by one.

Under Asst. Prof. Chong Liu at UChicago PME, a research team found a novel path around this longstanding problem – they created a new method of pore generation that builds materials with intentional weak spots, then applies a remote electric field to generate multiple nanoscale pores all at once.

• Read more about how this research could advance targeted water decontamination and resource recovery for batteries

Life from a drop of rain: New research suggests rainwater helped form the first protocell walls

One of the major unanswered questions about the origin of life is how droplets of RNA floating around the primordial soup turned into the membrane-protected packets of life we call cells.

A paper by engineers from UChicago PME, the University of Houston’s Chemical Engineering Department, and biologists from the UChicago Chemistry Department, have proposed a solution.

In the paper, published in Science Advances, UChicago PME postdoctoral researcher Aman Agrawal and his co-authors – including UChicago PME Dean Emeritus Matthew Tirrell and Nobel Prize-winning biologist Jack Szostak – show how rainwater could have helped create a meshy wall around protocells 3.8 billion years ago, a critical step in the transition from tiny beads of RNA to every bacterium, plant, animal, and human that ever lived.

• Read more about the new insight into the beginning of life

Interested in UChicago PME’s unique organizational structure and innovative approach? Read more about our Materials for Sustainability theme