Investigation of phosphorus removal using steel slag from aqueous solutions: a systematic review study

ABSTRACT

Phosphorous is one of the important pollutants, which exacerbates algal bloom in aqueous ecosystems. Also, presence of phosphorous (P) in surface water lets to a significant increase of water treatment cost at treatment plants. Many researches have made efforts to remove phosphorous from aqueous solution. One of these efforts is using adsorption process onto the industrial by-products, such as steel slag (SS). So, in this study, we are going to do a systematic review about the mentioned issue. All references were 137 in number, from which duplicates were removed manually and n = 91 records remained. After reading their titles, abstracts and full-texts, 59 relevant full-text articles remained in this systematic review. The relevant publications were from 1997 to 2019. In the studies, type of SS in different applications for removal of phosphorous at vary of pH value were used. The Electric Arc Furnace (EAF) SS (36%) and filtration system (37%) had many applications. Moreover, most relevant study (58%) reached to the optimum condition at alkaline pH value. In final, this review revealed that SS is promising and efficient material for removal of phosphorous from water and wastewater solutions. In addition, future perspectives of the application of SS as an industrial by-product were discussed in this study.

KEYWORDS:

• Phosphorus
• steel slag
• aqueous solutions
• systematic review

Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge Iran University of Medical Sciences for the financial support. We also acknowledge the School of Health for providing research facilities.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.