Recent trends of supercritical CO2 Brayton cycle: Bibliometric analysis and research review

Supercritical CO2 (S-CO2) Brayton cycle has been applied to various heat sources in recent decades, owing to the characteristics of compact structure and high efficiency. Understanding the research development in this emerging research field is crucial for future study. Thus, a bibliometric approach is employed to analyze the scientific publications of S-CO2 cycle field from 2000 to 2019. In Scopus database, there were totally 724 publications from 1378 authors and 543 institutes, which were distributed over 55 countries. Based on the software-BibExcel, these publications were analyzed from various aspects, such as major research areas, affiliations and keyword occurrence frequency. Furthermore, parameters such as citations, hot articles were also employed to evaluate the research output of productive countries, institutes and authors. The analysis showed that each paper has been cited 13.39 times averagely. United States was identified as the leading country in S-CO2 research followed by China and South Korea. Based on the contents of publications, existing researches on S-CO2 are briefly reviewed from the five aspects, namely application, cycle configurations and modeling, CO2-based mixtures, system components, and experiments. Future development is suggested to accelerate the commercialization of S-CO2 power system. (C) 2020 Korean Nuclear Society, Published by Elsevier Korea LLC.