Application-Oriented Advanced Oxidation Processes: Key Challenges and Pathways toward Large-Scale Deployment

Advanced oxidation technologies based on environmental functional materials are widely recognized as a key technical foundation for achieving deep industrial pollution control while simultaneously enabling carbon mitigation. However, a pronounced gap persists between laboratory-scale research and practical engineering implementation. Many material systems that exhibit excellent performance at the milligram scale under well-controlled laboratory conditions often fail to meet the requirements of real-world treatment scenarios, which typically involve ton-scale throughput, continuous operation, and highly complex operating environments. This fundamental mismatch is not merely a materials issue, but rather a consequence of a prevailing research paradigm that has long prioritized maximizing intrinsic material performance and refining catalytic reaction mechanisms, while largely overlooking the inevitable constraints associated with scale-up, including engineering feasibility, economic sustainability, operational robustness, as well as low-carbon and safety considerations.

In real industrial scenarios, catalytic materials do not function as isolated entities; rather, their practical effectiveness is tightly intertwined with reactor configuration, mass-transfer efficiency, and energy delivery modes. Under such conditions, an overemphasis on maximizing intrinsic metrics often proves counterproductive during scale-up. These laboratory-optimized designs may exacerbate catalyst deactivation, intensify energy demand, drive up operational costs, and even introduce cumulative environmental risks, thereby eroding the overall technological advantage under realistic operating conditions. Collectively, these limitations highlight the necessity of shifting away from a strictly “material-centric” research paradigm toward a process-oriented design strategy that is explicitly guided by real-world operating demands, with integrated consideration of low-carbon performance, environmental safety, and long-term operational robustness.

Based on these considerations, this review proposes an industry-oriented closed-loop research paradigm aimed at bridging the gap between laboratory innovation and practical deployment. Specifically, real engineering demands are first used to backward-define the functional positioning and optimization of materials, thereby aligning material design with application-relevant performance targets. Subsequently, material–equipment integration is achieved through dedicated reactor and process development, enabling the effective translation of intrinsic material capabilities into system-level efficiency at the reactor scale. Furthermore, life-cycle assessment (LCA) and techno-economic analysis (TEA) are systematically incorporated to impose upstream constraints on energy consumption, carbon emissions, cost and environmental risks, ensuring environmental and economic sustainability of the proposed technological pathway. Finally, through the establishment of industry standards and validation via engineering demonstrations, this paradigm facilitates the normalization, reproducibility, and scalable dissemination of the technology, effectively shortening the transition from laboratory outcomes to real-world implementation and providing a viable route for the industrial application of environmental functional materials.