Lemann Center Events

Water treatment often combines several methods to improve water quality and make it suitable for a specific end use, but those have serious barriers and disadvantages – such as low energy efficiencies and inconsistent removal of one or more categories of micropollutants. Brazil has the highest freshwater availability in the world, but it is not proportional to the demand, and in more densely populated regions, water scarcity and quality are a current challenge. In this sense, per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a broad group of persistent contaminants, prevalent in diverse water matrices of relevance, and, even though Brazil is one of the main producers of sulfluramid, a pesticide that decomposes in a per-fluoroalkyl substance, we still don’t have a legislation to monitor and prevent contamination of surface water bodies, which only a limited number of chemicals are regulated in water destined for human consumption.

Given this context, innovative solutions are needed to improve water quality; thus, in our current work, we aim to develop advanced materials for purifying PFAS-contaminated water by tuning polymer structure and adsorption/desorption conditions to create a sustainable, high-performance alternative to conventional water treatment.

Yuri Giovane Kappenberg is a Werner Baer Post-Doctoral fellow, developing his research at the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UIUC, under the supervision of Professor Xiao Su. He received his bachelor’s degree in Chemistry at the Universidade de Santa Cruz do Sul (UNISC/RS), and his Master’s and PhD in Organic Chemistry at the Universidade Federal de Santa Maria (UFSM/RS), with his work focused on the synthesis of heterocyclic compounds and their biological and photophysical evaluation. His research at UIUC focuses on developing redox polymers for the treatment of contaminants of emerging concern in Brazilian water systems.