Processos de adsorção usando biocarvão: tendências e perspectivas a partir de uma análise cienciométrica

Abstract

One of the biggest problems that affect the environment is the amount of materials from agricultural, forestry and urban activities disposed in nature and in landfills. The production of activated carbon and biochar presents an alternative for the destination of these residues in order to minimize the impact caused. Another problem that has been highlighted in recent years is the improper release of industrial effluents (containing heavy metals, drugs and dyes) to water resources, which end up also contaminating the soil. Adsorption is one of the main processes for removing and reducing these residues from the environment due to the characteristic properties present in biochar. Thus, biochars fit into the waste treatment with adsorption processes. The systematic review of the literature differs from the review of the traditional literature in that it uses a more rational approach for the selection of articles as well as their analysis, for this, applications of laws and tools are necessary. The objective of this work was to identify the trends and perspectives of the adsorption processes by biochar from a scientometric analysis. The scientometric analysis was composed of several phases, the first was the definition of the research theme and the search for keywords in the database. Between 2001 and 2020, 712 publications obtained from the Web of Science database were exported and analyzed using the Bibliometrix tool to define and critically analyze the main authors, journals and countries. The most relevant author according to the number of global citations was Ahmad M. with his article on the pyrolysis process, the periodical and the most relevant country based on the number of articles was Bioresource Technology and China, respectively. It is often impracticable to analyze and select articles due to the large number of results obtained in the research. In this sense, the Methodi Ordinatio methodology was used, which allows classifying publications considering the year and number of citations for each publication and the journal's impact factor. With this methodology, 20 articles with an InOrdinatio index above 200 were selected. Agricultural residues stood out as the most used biomass for biochar production. Among the contaminants, the main focus was heavy metals, due to their difficulty in removing them from the environment. For this purpose, in several publications, the modification of the biochar surface was reported in order to facilitate the adsorption process.