Ai4Value contributed article in iScience: Is there progress in the adsorbent development for water treatment?
A new article Is there progress in the adsorbent development for water treatment? by Tero Luukkonen from Oulu University and Juhani Teeriniemi from Ai4Value Oy has been published in iScience, a Cell Press open access journal.
A vast amount of articles were analyzed with help of AI to understand the global progress on the
adsorbent materials development. The outcome was that most of the studies revealed no or only modest improvement while the very best materials showed staggering capacities.
Article summary:
Adsorption technology is an essential part of modern water treatment. However, only a handful of adsorbent materials are used industrially which is in striking contrast with the exponentially increasing scientific publishing activity. In this perspective, the aim was to understand the global progress on the adsorbent materials development by using the reported adsorption capacities as a simple probe.
An automated text analyzer employing a large language model was used to extract adsorption data. Total 11,664 scientific journal articles about ammonium, arsenic, lead, methylene blue, or nitrate adsorption covering years 1973-2023 were analyzed.
When the adsorption capacities were plotted as a function of publication time, a twofold trend was revealed: most of the studies (i.e., up to the 50–75% percentile rank) revealed no or only modest improvement in the adsorption capacities while the very best materials exhibited staggering capacities up to the order of 103–104 mg g