Mohammadamin Akbari

The construction industry relies heavily on concrete as a fundamental material. According to the shift towards environmental sustainability in recent years, studies on life cycle assessment (LCA) of concrete and mortar and reducing their environmental impacts have increased significantly. This paper provides insights into studies performed in LCA of fresh concrete and mortar until 2021 by using a bibliometric method. To achieve this goal, 283 documents were selected from the Scopus database for bibliometric analysis. VOSviewer and Publish or Perish tools were used to perform bibliometric analysis and data visualization. Various aspects of existing documents, including top sources, countries, and authors, were analyzed. Citation analysis was conducted to identify articles with the most citations. Co-occurrence analysis has been used for analyzing keywords to identify research trends and future research directions. The number of studies in this area has grown significantly in recent years, according to the results. Among all subject areas, engineering and environmental science are recognized as the main areas of existing researches. Journal of Cleaner Production is one of the leading journals in this field. Among the productive countries, the USA is recognized as the leader. However, de Brito J. from Portugal is the most prolific author in this field. The most influential document in this field was written by Habert et al., which includes the highest citations among all documents. Keyword analysis indicates that “Fly Ash” has the most occurrence among all keywords. However, “Recycled Aggregates” recorded the highest annual average growth rate in recent years.

Waste foundry sand (WFS) is the by-product of the foundry industry, which is produced about 0.6 tons per 1 ton of foundry industry production. While it cannot be recycled or reused, it will be disposed of in landfills. Today, with increasing attention to environmental issues, the reuse and recycle of materials because of limited resources have been considered. Due to the desirable properties of WFS, many studies have been done on the properties and performance of its use in various industries, especially in concrete technology. The purpose of this paper is to conduct a bibliometric analysis of foundry sand research during the years 1971-2020. Various aspects, such as document types, languages, major journals, key countries, authors, and keywords, have been examined. The collaborations among authors and countries were constructed, visualized, and evaluated through the application of the social network analysis method based on co-authorship relations. Also, keyword cluster analysis has been performed using co-occurrence relations to discover the most prominent issues related to WFS. The results showed that the number of publications (TP) has improved significantly in recent years, especially in 2018-2020. It has increased from 1 in 1971 to 38 in 2020. The engineering subdivision with 33% has had the highest number of papers. Also, India, China, and the USA have the highest number of publications, respectively. Statistical data from the author keyword study showed that in general, papers can be classified into three categories in terms of subject: first, characteristics of WFS and its importance; second, the use of WFS in concrete and the study of mechanical and physical properties as one of its applications; and the third, investigation on environmental effects and damage caused by disposal and landfill of WFS and efforts to find solutions for recycling and reuse. The keywords “Waste Foundry Sand,” “Foundry Sand,” and “Compressive Strength” with a growth rate of 2700%, 1900%, and 1100%, respectively, are important topics in the field of WFS research.