Center for Environment and Water Resources, College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China; Key Laboratory of Hunan Province for Water Environment and Agriculture Product Safety, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China.
Center for Environment and Water Resources, College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China; Key Laboratory of Hunan Province for Water Environment and Agriculture Product Safety, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China E-mail:
Water Sci Technol. 2024 May;89(9):2311-2325. doi: 10.2166/wst.2024.121. Epub 2024 Apr 23.
Rational disposal of sludge is an ongoing concern. This work is the first attempt for in-depth statistical analysis of anaerobic digestion (AD) research in recent three decades (1986-2022) using both quantitative and qualitative approaches in bibliometrics to investigate the research progress, trends and hot spots. All publications in the Web of Science Core Collection database from 1986 to April 4, 2022 were analyzed. Results showed that the research on AD started in 1999 and the number of papers significantly increased since 2012. The research about the disposal of sewage sludge mainly focuses on energy recovery (e.g. methane and short chain volatile organic acids) by AD. Besides, different pretreatment technologies were studied in this study to eliminate the negative effects on the disposal of sludge caused by hydrolysis (rate-limiting step of AD), water content (increasing the costs) and heavy metal (toxic to the environment) of sludge. Of those, the treatment technologies related to direct interspecies electron transfer were worth further studied in the future. Towards that end, iron conductive material, iron-based advanced oxidation and biological treatment were concluded as the prospective technologies and worth to further study.
污泥的合理处置一直是人们关注的问题。本研究首次采用文献计量学的定量和定性方法，对近 30 年来（1986-2022 年）的厌氧消化（AD）研究进行了深入的统计分析，以调查研究进展、趋势和热点。对 1986 年至 2022 年 4 月 4 日在 Web of Science 核心合集数据库中的所有出版物进行了分析。结果表明，AD 的研究始于 1999 年，自 2012 年以来，论文数量显著增加。关于污水污泥处置的研究主要集中在通过 AD 回收能源（如甲烷和短链挥发性有机酸）。此外，本研究还研究了不同的预处理技术，以消除水解（AD 的限速步骤）、含水量（增加成本）和重金属（对环境有毒）对污泥处置的负面影响。其中，与直接种间电子转移相关的处理技术值得在未来进一步研究。为此，铁导电材料、铁基高级氧化和生物处理被认为是有前途的技术，值得进一步研究。
