Search

Water is essential to human health and economic development due to its utilization in sanitation, agriculture, and energy. Supplying water to an expanding world population requires simultaneous consideration of multiple societal sectors competing for limited resources. Water conservation, supply augmentation, distribution, and treatment of contaminants must work in concert to ensure water sustainability. Water is linked to other sectors, and the quantity and quality of water resources are changing. The efficient use of water in agriculture, the largest user of water worldwide, via drip irrigation is described as is the use of energy-intensive reverse osmosis to supplement freshwater supplies. Efforts to manage watersheds and model their responses to severe weather events are discussed along with efforts to improve the predictability of their function. The regional competition for water resources impacts both energy and water supply reliability, which requires that nations balance both for sustainable economic development. The use of water and energy in the US is described which provides a lens through which to both rethink the interrelationship of water and energy as well as evaluate technological developments. Advances in nanotechnology are highlighted as one emerging technology. These results underscore the multifaceted nature of water sustainability, its interrelationship to energy and economic development, and the need to develop, manage and regulate water systems in a concerted manner.

Researchers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee conducted sorption experiments on pertechnetate using a class of bifunctional strong-base anion-exchange resin sites composed of two trialkyl-ammonium groups

Functionalized scaffolds have provided a versatile pathway to the design of ion-selective polymer-supported reagents and polyols have -OH groups that have modified the mciroenvironment around the primary ligand, thus affecting the ionic affinities by direct interaction with the ligand and the metal ion. The studies have shown that since the -OH groups in carbohydrates have formed complexes with lanthanides, the changes in the order have shown -OH group participation in the binding mechanism.

The metal ionic affinities of a range of phosphorylated polyols and phosphorylated tris(hydroxymethyl)aminomethane resins are investigated by immobilization of the phosphate ligand onto polymer-supported (hydroxymethyl)aminomethane. It is inferred that the hydrogen bonding to phosphate ligand is a significant process by which the ligand is activated toward binding metal ions.

The concept of immobilizing ligands onto cross-linked polymer supports is presented as an evolution of a concept that begins with ion exchange resins and evolves into ion-selective polymers, polymer-supported catalysts, and the general area of polymer-supported reagents. Each of the four categories of polymers is defined by a set of major variables {electrostatic attraction (for ion exchange resins); steric, geometric, and electronic factors (for ion-selective polymers); attracting and orienting reactants, and stabilizing the transition state (for polymer-supported catalysts); and binding reactants with weak or strong forces (for polymer-supported reagents)} and of minor variables {pH, concentration, competing ions, counterions, ionic strength, hydrophilic/hydrophobic interactions, hydration energies, and polymer crosslink level}. The rational design of each category will require identifying the relationships between major and minor variables and applying the principles inherent to complexity science will be an important focus of future research. © 2017 Society of Chemical Industry [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]