Facing the new environmental issues of our century requires effective and safe technologies for sites treatment and remediation, pollution sensing and detection, and air and water purification. Nanotechnologies and nanomaterials can offer environmental friendly and cost effective solutions alternative to conventional treatment and materials. As a matter of fact, the use of nanostructured materials in environmental monitoring, protection and remediation growing up year by year.
Moreover, nanomaterials are important to offer successful solutions for specific applications in various fields as energy production, production process, biomedical applications with a dramatic reduction of the impact on the ecosystems.
Obviously the prerequisite of such technical improvements is the effective and economical production of nanostructures as nanoparticles, nanotubes, nanorods, and self-assembled materials.
The contributions of this volume give a wide scenario on the production of nanomaterials either for production process more environmental friendly, or for their use on purification treatments of polluted air, water and soil.
The point of view is that one of Industrial Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, that is to propose nanomaterial production processes and environmental treatments which are technically and economically feasible.
Together with novel processes viable only by the use of nanomaterial, as the degradation of organic pollutants by photocatalysis under sunrays, the volume presents traditional chemical operations as adsorption or membrane filtration, which have been greatly improved by the use of nanostructured materials and their functionalization.
The final goal is to foster an increasing use of nanomaterials in novel production processes or environmental treatments, merging the industrial needs and research contributions from physicians, chemists, chemical and material engineers.
Angelo Chianese, Luca Di Palma, Elisabetta Petrucci, Marco Stoller (Guest Editors)
