Abstract
The demand together with the urgency of phosphogypsum (PG) treatment will pose significant challenges for many countries. This research aims to explore the research progress of PG, including basic status, cooperation situation, research fields, and development trends, based on the Web of Science database through bibliometric analysis of publications (articles and patents) from 1990 to 2020. The results show that academic research on PG originated early, but the number of patents grew quickly. China is a global leader in terms of the number of publications and plays a significant role in international cooperation. The knowledge of PG has remained concentrated in the fields of natural radioactivity, cement paste backfilling, soil, crystal morphology, and synthetic gas. However, academic hotspots focus on the microstructure of chemical processes and various environmental impacts; patents and hot technologies are based on the production of refractory materials, ceramics, surface materials, cement mortar, and composite materials. The academic frontiers of PG will be centered on exploiting the methods of recovering rare earth elements from PG, the conditions of ion solidification/stabilization in PG, the impact of reaction conditions on product quality, and the reaction mechanism at the micro-level. The frontiers of patents need to focus on the improvement of manufacturing equipment, new wall materials, and chemically modified polymer materials. Envisaging the number of articles and patents to be published in the future, architectural research has a large room for improvement. This paper conducts an in-depth analysis of PG and provides information on the technological development prospects and opportunities, which is helpful for researchers engaged in PG management.
Highlights
Phosphorus chemical industry refers to a chemical sub-industry that uses phosphate ore and sulfur as the raw materials to produce phosphorus
This study conducted a bibliometric analysis of the articles and patents of PG in the web of science from 1990 to 2020
In terms of the quantity of national output, China has an absolute advantage in both articles and patents, but Spain, Brazil, Industrial Research (India) and the United States perform better in a great part of indicators that reflect the quality of the literatures
Summary
Phosphorus chemical industry refers to a chemical sub-industry that uses phosphate ore and sulfur as the raw materials to produce phosphorus. The products of the phosphorus chemical industry have been widely used in various industries, national defense, cuttingedge science, and people's lives (Zhang and Zhang, 2018). Phosphogypsum (PG, mainly CaSO42H2O) is the by-product of wet process phosphoric acid production (Beretka et al, 1993). The production of 1 ton of phosphoric acid (calculated as P2O5) will approximately produce 5 tons of PG, which are mainly discharged, stored or reused (Chen et al, 2018). As the expansion of the phosphorus chemical industry and the requirements of environmental protection, currently, piling up on the ground is the main treatment of PG, which occupies lots of lands, and causes severe environmental pollution (Mohammed et al, 2018; Moreira et al, 2018). About 20–30 billion tons of PG are produced annually worldwide to pose tremendous pressure on environmental protection and create a huge challenge to its recycling (Pérez-López et al, 2016)
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