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To purify contaminated water, it is possible to just shake out the nanomaterials, according to a new study, at Michigan Technological University. It is a technique that purifies water as well as "greening nanotechnology" to be simple, shaking a vial of water and oil.

Hence, nanomaterials that are present in polluted water can be shaken out.

"These materials are very, very tiny and that means if you try to remove them and clean them out of contaminated water, that it's quite difficult," Dongyan Zhang, lead author of the study and professor of physics, said in news release.

He said that methods such as filter paper and meshes are not fool proof or effective.

Nanotechnology can be used in electronic and medical devices, as well as cosmetics. Still, tiny nanoparticles, as well as nanomaterials from such technologies tend to get into drinking water.

As more than 1,300 products are made with varying nanomaterials, health gets affected, according to the EPA.

By shaking oil and water, the nanomaterials get trapped and can be quickly eliminated. Such a method cleans out almost 100 percent of one and two-dimensional nanomaterials, but zero-dimensional nanospheres are too microscopic to be identified and picked up.

The study was published in the journal Applied Materials and Interfaces.

YouTube/Michigan Technological University