Computer calculations by colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, revealed DMSO knocks off the carboxylic acid group. “Once that happens it causes the entire molecule to fall apart in a cascade of reactions,” Dichtel says.
Some comments conclude that the chems discussed as “The “soap and solvent” is sodium hydroxide (lye) and DMSO at 120 C”
Not very often do I find something that intersects Hacker News (ycombinator) and Future4200 interests…
Because of the paper mills in Kalamazoo, PFAS is forever. We did a trial with fulvic acid, but it would take more than is commercially available on a WHOLESALE LEVEL to remediate.
The superfund is digging it up and moving it to a place that it won’t break down quickly and no one cares about.
After seeing the butane contamination threads problems and ultimate solutions, I honestly thought someone from this forum would solve PFAS contamination using membranes or something.
Quitting (pivoting) the extractor equipment game to build at home filtration systems would be such a 2022 thing.
Some of my undergrad research was in making metal organic frameworks (MOFs) to specifically filter out PFAS. We never went into scaleability but MOFs are really neat things with a lot of uses but would only really be useful in this centext treating effluent of producers and not enviromental cleanup. I know we tested UiO-66 vs MOF-808. They are crazy simple to make and the second one uses no heat and water as a solvent so easy to scale.
PFAS has strong potential to be a weed problem given the prevalence and application of PTFE and other fluorocarbons in the industry (PFAS in soil, industrial machinery/lab applications, PTFE parchment/PFAS in packaging materials). Other industries are dealing with this as we speak.
Coca-Cola had to directly address this issue for high-PFAS levels found in Topo-Chico. We’re talking ppts too.