A Review on Superadsorbents with Adsorption Capacity ≥1000 mg g −1 and Perspectives on Their Upscaling for Water/Wastewater Treatment

Kannan Karunakaran, Muhammad Usman () and Mika Sillanpää
Additional contact information
Kannan Karunakaran: Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Arts and Science, Bharath Institute of Higher Education and Research, Chennai 600073, India
Muhammad Usman: PEIE Research Chair for the Development of Industrial Estates and Free Zones, Center for Environmental Studies and Research, Sultan Qaboos University, Muscat 123, Oman
Mika Sillanpää: Department of Chemical Engineering, School of Mining, Metallurgy and Chemical Engineering, University of Johannesburg, P.O. Box 17011, Doornfontein 2028, South Africa

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 24, 1-19

Abstract: An adsorbent’s properties, its adsorption chemistry, and treatment efficiency are all interlinked for water/wastewater treatment. This critical review focuses on superadsorbents possessing ultrahigh adsorption capacities of ≥1000 mg g −1 for an efficient water/wastewater treatment. Using Google Scholar, we reviewed about 63 prominent studies (2017–2022) on superadsorbents to evaluate their preparation, characteristics, adsorption chemistries, and mechanistic interactions in the removal of aqueous inorganic and organic contaminants. The major contribution of this article is to present a series of perspectives on the potential upscaling of these adsorbents in real-scale water/wastewater treatment. The main findings are as follows: (1) the current literature analysis suggests that superadsorbents hold reasonable promise to become useful materials in water treatment, (2) there is still a need to perform extensive pilot-scale adsorption studies using superadsorbents under quasi-real systems representing complex real aqueous systems, and (3) the technoeconomic analysis of their upscaling in industrial-scale water/wastewater treatments still constitutes a major gap which calls for further studies. Moreover, the mass production and effective application of these superadsorbents are the major issues for real-scale water treatments.

Keywords: water pollutants; pollutant removal; adsorption; superadsorbent; wastewater treatment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/24/16927/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/24/16927/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:14:y:2022:i:24:p:16927-:d:1006120

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().