Three-in-one sponge to clean the environment

Materials that can clean up the environment and improve efficiency of industrial processes are always in demand. So prospects are promising for a new material that can do this in three ways: it strips sulphur from fuel, removes mercury from polluted water, and separates gases in industrial processes.

The material is an aerogel – a gel from which the liquid component has been removed to leave gas-filled voids. Aerogels have the lowest density of any known solid-state material.

While typically aerogels are composed of silicon or aluminium oxides, Mercouri Kanatzidis's team at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, has been experimenting with "chalcogels". These are aerogels composed of "chalcogenides" such as sulphides and selenides, linked by platinum atoms.