Desalination technology for energy-efficient and low-cost water production: A bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Over the last few decades, steady growth in desalination literature has been observed. However, conducting a quantitative analysis of this literature is still a novelty. This study aimed at carrying out a quantitative analysis of desalination literature published during the last 30 years, using bibliometric and content analysis techniques, based on the Web of Science database. The bibliometric analysis revealed that desalination has received much attention after the year 2000, as 95.4% of literature has been published in two decades after 2000. The text mining analysis showed that the hot themes of desalination research are reverse osmosis optimization, graphene implications, interfacial polymerization, capacitive deionization, carbon nanotube implications, and antifouling techniques. Furthermore, it was observed that many desalination technologies have emerged recently that make it a challenge to choose the right desalination technology for industrialization. Therefore, this study also contributed to identifying the factors that are important for the industrialization of desalination technologies and, based on these identified factors, this study has compared different desalination technologies to unearth the energy-efficient and low production cost technology. Analytical hierarchy process was used for comparing existing desalination technologies based on eight different parameters and it demonstrated that reverse osmosis is the best available technology for desalination.