Adsorbents for real-scale water remediation: Gaps and the road forward

Over the last couple of decades, academic research on adsorbents has been flourishing. The preparation, functionalization, and adsorption performance evaluation have grown explosively. Novel adsorbents have demonstrated excellent capabilities to remove metal ions and organic contaminants from aqueous environments having different physicochemical conditions. This article presents gaps and potential research possibilities related to economic assessment, benchmarking of synthetic real wastewaters, adsorptive (component) additivity, constraints of process scale-up, process intensification, and modeling, simulation and optimization of large-scale adsorption-based water remediation systems. These discussions foster fresh ideas and investigations in the cognate science and engineering disciplines so that industrial applications of novel adsorbents for innovative water treatment matures both technically and cost-effectively.