Forward osmosis research trends in desalination and wastewater treatment: A review of research trends over the past decade

Abstract

Issues of water scarcity and water security have driven the rapid development of various technologies to ensure water sustainability. The forward osmosis (FO) membrane process has been widely recognized as one of the more promising technologies to play an important role in alleviating the issues of water sustainability. Extensive research has been carried out worldwide to explore the potential of FO in desalination, water and wastewater treatment and reclamation. It is of the utmost importance to understand the topics of interest and research trends to further advance the development of FO process technology. In this study, a bibliometric analysis based on the Scopus database was carried out to identify and understand the global research trends of FO process based on 6 main analyses: basic growth trends, journals, countries, institutions, authors, and keywords. A total of 1462 article records published between 1967-2018 were extracted from Scopus and used as the raw data for bibliometric analysis using VOSviewer software. The total number of FO articles has sharply increased since 2009 and stabilized at around 250 publications in the past three years. The increase could be associated with the breakthrough in FO membrane science, where the contributions were from the 5 most productive countries: USA, China, Singapore, Australia, and South Korea. FO research started to diversify after the appearance of commercial FO membranes with improved characteristics, enabling the researchers to employ them for various application studies. Keywords analysis showed that the main directions of FO research could be categorized into three clusters: application of FO, membrane fouling study, and FO membrane synthesis. These bibliometric results provide a valuable reference and information on current research directions of FO for researchers and industry practitioners who are interested in FO technology.

Forward Osmosis: A Critical Review

“…While there have been a couple of review papers in recent years concerning the basic principles of FO [21][22][23][24], draw solutions [22,[25][26][27][28][29][30][31], applications [21,25,27,[32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39], (bio)fouling [22,25,26,30,[40][41][42][43][44][45][46], membrane fabrication [19,23,30,35,39,43,47,48], or upscaling [49,50], we, for the major part of this review, discuss the challenges of FO evidences from various literatures to prove the unreliability of the existing structural parameter approaches. In addition, we will highlight that, beyond a certain water permeability, the true bottleneck is the mechanical support of the membrane instead of the selective membrane layer.…”

Unlocking the application potential of forward osmosis through integrated/hybrid process

“…The research on the FO process has not diminished despite the challenges encountered by this technology, with the number of reported articles hitting more than 250 in 2018 [11]. The main category of studies that have been driving the FO research was membrane synthesis and FO application.…”

Preparation of TFC Membranes Supported with Elelctrospun Nanofibers for Desalination by Forward Osmosis

“…One of the crucial aspects of developing FO process is making a suitable membrane for this process. The ideal membrane has to be highly porous, thin, with good mechanical properties and provides high rejection of salts and impurities (Ang et al, 2019). Thin-film composite (TFC) membranes have been widely used in reverse osmosis studies and proven to have excellent performance in desalination (Kadhom et al, 2016;Kadhom and Deng, 2018).…”