Critisism of the Scholastic Approach in Researching Novel Adsorbents for Water Purification

Abstract

Over the past two decades, many scientific journals have published a series of articles on environmental topics, which follow a similar pattern for studying adsorption on new materials. A review of more than 30 articles (as well as review practices), primarily focusing on the adsorption of synthetic organic compounds on new activated carbon materials, identifies the stages of scholarly research and highlights the main methodological and theoretical errors. These errors undermine the scientific value of these studies and reduce the experimental data presented within them to the status of scientific spam. The term “scholasticism” is used here in the sense of “pedantry,” “unified” nonessential research tasks, and excessive pondering over known or trivial matters. These issues point to gaps in the theoretical and practical training of young researchers. A typical feature of the scholastic approach is identified: instead of determining the conventional universal adsorption isotherm, the focus is on studying the influence of initial concentration, adsorbent weight, particle size, and contact time on adsorption efficiency—trends that are already well known to specialists. The epistemological significance and necessity of the stage of modeling experimental isotherms using both classical (Langmuir and Freundlich) and modern equations are critically evaluated. The paper presents a unique perspective on the role and objectives of modeling. The scholastic approach in kinetics relies on a formal description of rate laws, which predominantly ignore the physical nature of the adsorption of organic, especially aromatic, compounds, the hydrodynamics of flow, the fractional state of the adsorbent, the multistep nature of the process, and its limiting stage. The typical and characteristic inaccuracy of thermodynamic calculations in works exhibiting features of scholarly pedantry is highlighted, with the cause identified as the incorrect determination of the adsorption equilibrium constant, K_e. The paper gives specific methodological recommendations for environmental researchers, for whom adsorption-based water purification presents a new challenge, to avoid scholastic errors in their experimental endeavors and preserve the scientific value of their future work.