Dong-A University Research Team Develops Real-Time Tracking Technology for Microplastic Degradation

Published in JACS, the Most Prestigious Journal in Chemistry...Elucidating a Plasmon-Based Degradation Mechanism

Dong-A University announced that a research team led by Professor Lee Seunghun of the Department of Chemistry has published a research paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS), the world’s most prestigious academic journal in the field of chemistry.

The paper, titled "In Situ SERS Monitoring of Plasmon-Mediated Degradation of Microplastics," lists Yang Junyoung, an integrated master's and doctoral program student in the Department of Chemical Engineering and a BK21 FOUR researcher, as the first author, and Kang Minju of the Department of Chemistry as a contributing author. The corresponding author is Professor Lee Seunghun.

The study was conducted as an international joint research project, with participation from Dr. Ramesh Kumar Chitmula, a postdoctoral researcher, and Professor Jang Junkyung of the Department of Nano Energy Engineering at Pusan National University, as well as Professor Emiliano Cortes of the University of Munich in Germany.

The research team succeeded in degrading polyethylene (PE) microplastics in an aqueous environment under visible-light conditions using gold nanoparticle clusters (Au nanoparticle clusters), and in tracking the degradation process in real time using the surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) technique.

Whereas previous studies on microplastic degradation have mainly focused on changes in particle size before and after degradation or on the analysis of degradation products, this study is distinguished by its direct observation, at the molecular level, of the reaction mechanism and intermediates during the degradation process. The team simultaneously used the gold nanoparticle clusters as both a catalyst and a SERS platform to monitor the microplastic degradation reaction in real time (in situ).

In particular, they demonstrated that the cluster structure containing nanogaps effectively promotes the reaction under visible-light conditions, and identified hydroxyl radicals generated from the water-splitting reaction as the key reactive species, thereby elucidating the degradation mechanism of microplastics.

Professor Lee Seunghun said, "This will provide fundamental data that can be widely applied to advancing microplastic reduction technologies and to research on environmental catalysis based on plasmonic nanostructures," adding, "It is also highly meaningful that undergraduate and graduate students worked together to achieve results in a top-tier international journal."

This research was supported by the BK21 program, the Excellent Young Researcher Program and the Basic Research Laboratory Program of the National Research Foundation of Korea funded by the Ministry of Science and ICT.

(From left) Yang Junyoung, an integrated master's and doctoral program student at Dong-A University; Kang Minju, a student; and Professor Lee Seunghun.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.