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Waste-to-sensor upcycling of polyethylene terephthalate over Ag/Zr-MOF photocatalyst for microplastic degradation and AI-assisted heavy metal detection

Journal of Biological Engineering 2026

Summary

Researchers developed a closed-loop system in which a silver/zirconium MOF photocatalyst simultaneously degrades PET microplastics and produces a sensing reporter molecule, then applied AI-assisted physics-guided models to back-calculate heavy metal concentrations from the sensor signal, integrating plastic remediation and environmental monitoring into a single platform.

Polymers

sensing, and physics guided models refined with lightweight machine learning provided robust concentration back calculation. The novelty lies in a closed loop design in which MOF mediated depolymerization simultaneously produces the sensing reporter and enables data assisted quantification, supporting scalable remediation and monitoring within a single integrated scheme.

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