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The group has leveraged the electrically conductive nature of a special kind of nanofiber, called carbon nanotubes (CNT). CNTs are tiny cylindrical tubes made of tightly bonded carbon atoms, measuring just one atom thick. But the CNTs Dr. Hashaikeh’s team used, which were provided by global security, aerospace, and information technology company Lockheed Martin, are not ordinary CNTs.

“The carbon nanostructures supplied by Lockheed Martin are special; they are networked. This means that they are composed of many interconnecting channels that branch off in all directions. This interconnectivity is what enables the entire membrane to become completely cleaned when electricity is applied to it,” Dr. Hashaikeh said.

The networked CNTs, also known as carbon nanostructures (CNS), coupled with the team’s expert membrane fabrication know-how, resulted in the development of two different types of membranes that can clean themselves when a low-voltage electric current is run through them.

The first type is a microfiltration membrane, which has pores sizes ranging from 100 nanometers to 10 micrometers, where a nanometer is approximately one hundred thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair and a micrometer one thousand times larger than a nanometer. The second is….(LINK)