Papers

Predicting adsorption capacity of pharmaceuticals and personal care products on long-term aged microplastics using machine learning

Researchers found that long-term aged microplastics adsorb 7-13 times more pharmaceuticals and personal care products than pristine microplastics, and developed machine learning models using infrared spectroscopy that predicted adsorption capacity with over 96% accuracy.

Surface characteristics of polystyrene microplastics mainly determine their coagulation performances

Researchers evaluated polyaluminum sulfate coagulant for removing polystyrene microplastics from water, achieving 90.4% removal at optimal dosage. Surface characteristics of microplastics including density, particle size, and adsorbed substances significantly influenced coagulation efficiency.

Effects of Polystyrene Microplastics on Multiple Tetracycline Removals by Ferrate

This study investigated how polystyrene microplastics affect the removal of antibiotics (tetracyclines) by ferrate water treatment. Fresh microplastics actually boosted antibiotic removal by nearly 30%, while weathered microplastics varied in their effect and heavily soaked microplastics reduced removal efficiency by up to 42%. These results show that microplastics can interfere with water treatment processes in complex ways, complicating the removal of pharmaceutical pollutants from drinking water sources.

Stronger when wet: Aquatically robust chitinous objects via zero-waste coordination with metal ions

Researchers developed a fully biodegradable material made from chitosan — a naturally abundant molecule found in shells and fungi — that actually gets stronger when wet by using trace amounts of nickel to form water-activated molecular bonds. Unlike most synthetic plastics, this material degrades naturally and could serve as a sustainable alternative for water-resistant products.

Effects of polypropylene microplastics on multiple sulfonamide removals by the Fenton process

Effect of Microplastics on the Flow-Through Electro-Peroxone Process: A Computational Fluid Dynamics Simulation

Researchers used computational fluid dynamics simulations to examine how microplastics affect mass transfer in a flow-through electro-peroxone advanced oxidation process, finding that microplastic presence alters fluid dynamics and contaminant removal efficiency in ways that static experimental measurements cannot easily capture.

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Toward a Comprehensive Domestic Dirt Dataset Curation for Cleaning Auditing Applications

This paper presents a dataset of 3,000 microscope images covering nine categories of household dirt, created to support AI-based cleaning inspection and robot-assisted auditing. Classification models trained on the dataset achieved over 90% accuracy in offline tests. This is a computer vision and robotics study rather than a microplastics research paper.