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The environmental engineering paradigm is steadily moving towards a newer generation in today’s world and is surpassing visionary frontiers. Chemical engineering and separation processes are witnessing drastic and serious challenges. Environmental sustainability is vehemently and intensely gearing towards new and fresh challenges. Environmental disasters have urged the scientific domain to take drastic measures. Man’s scientific vision at this critical juncture of history and time needs to be restructured and re-envisioned. A critical overview is drawn along with this visionary treatise to lucidly delve deep into the scientific understanding of advanced environmental separation processes, analysis and application of nanotechnology. The author with deep comprehension delves deep into the latent world of advanced environmental engineering separation processes, especially advanced oxidation processes, integrated advanced oxidation processes and membrane separation processes, particularly nanofiltration. Furthermore, this treatise opens new frontiers in relevant environmental analysis and the successful and effective application of nanotechnology in environmental separation processes. The future vision of advanced environmental separation processes is absolutely bright and groundbreaking. Scientific knowledge, scientific prowess and scientific empowerment will go a long way in opening new vistas of cognizant frontiers in the field of advanced oxidation techniques, application of nanotechnology and relevant environmental analysis in generations to come. In today’s world of fervent and cautious environmental sustainability, challenges needs to be surmounted in the field of industrial wastewater treatment, provision of clean drinking water and application of nanotechnology, especially nanofiltration, ultrafiltration and microfiltration. A deep understanding of the provision of clean drinking water and desalination is the hallmark of this paper. In a separate dimension and a separate section, the author instinctively delves deep into the hidden world of the application of membrane separation process in drinking water treatment and relevant environmental analysis. The crux of this treatise is to highlight the importance of advanced environmental separation processes and relevant applications of nanotechnology. The ultimate and purposeful vision is targeted towards greater scientific understanding and scientific truth in unfolding the hidden and latent areas of advanced environmental separation science and fostering the vision towards greater environmental sustainability.

Semiconductor photoelectrochemistry experienced a renaissance stimulated by the development of mesoporous dye-sensitized solar cells following the 1991 Nature paper of O'Regan and Gratzel. The resulting move away from well-defined single crystal bulk materials to high surface area nanostructured electrodes opened a new field of research, and many of the ideas that had been developed for bulk semiconductor electrodes required re-examination in view of the very different length scales. Nanostructured semiconductor electrodes are now also being utilized for light-driven water splitting and environmental remediation. This historical development has resulted in a convergence of the fields of semiconductor photoelectrochemistry and photocatalysis at semiconductor particles. The objective of this chapter is to review the basic ideas that were developed originally to understand the photoelectrochemical behaviour of bulk semiconductors and to see how these ideas need to be modified when considering nanostructured semiconductor electrodes and dispersed colloidal systems.

By combining the physics of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and silicon radio-frequency (RF) integrated circuits, we recently created progressively smaller NMR systems, which have been reported in references 1–4. Our strategy for NMR system miniaturization proved effective, culminating in the smallest prototype that weighs 0.1 kg and can be held in the palm of the hand. These small, low-cost NMR systems can be useful as biomolecular sensors in the personalized medicine setting, and we demonstrated their ability to detect proteins, compounds, and human cancer cells. The chapter reviews these developments. Portions of this chapter are reprinted from our recent review paper of with permission.

In the last decade, photovoltaics (PV) has experienced an important transformation. Traditional solar cells formed by compact semiconductor layers have been joined by new kinds of cells that are constituted by a complex mixture of organic, inorganic and solid or liquid electrolyte materials, and rely on charge separation at the nanoscale. Recently, metal organic halide perovskites have appeared in the photovoltaic landscape showing large conversion efficiencies, and they may share characteristics of the two former types. In this paper we provide a general description of the photovoltaic mechanisms of the single absorber solar cell types, combining all-inorganic and hybrid and organic cells into a single framework. The operation of the solar cell relies on a number of internal processes that exploit internal charge separation and overall charge collection minimizing recombination. There are two main effects to achieve the required efficiency, first to exploit kinetics at interfaces, favouring the required forward process, and second to take advantage of internal electrical fields caused by a built-in voltage and by the distribution of photogenerated charges. These principles represented by selective contacts, interfaces and the main energy diagram, form a solid base for the discussion of the operation of future types of solar cells. Additional effects based on ferroelectric polarization and ionic drift provide interesting prospects for investigating new PV effects mainly in the perovskite materials. This work was supported by MINECO of Spain under a project (MAT2013-47192-C3-1-R), and the Helmholtz-Energy-Alliance ‘‘Hybrid-Photovoltaics’’.