Nanotechnology in construction: state of the art and future trends

The construction industry has long been regarded asenergy-intensive and high pollution industry. The emergence of nanotechnology provides an ideal solution for the construction industry to energy saving and consumption reduction. The introduction of nanotechnology has greatly promoted the development of new green building materials and brought huge economic and social benefits. This paper applies bibliometric analysis to review the nanotechnology-construction research collected by Web of Science database during 2000-2020, and further visualize their literature characteristics. At the global level, the number of literatures on nanotechnology-construction research has been on the rise in 2000-2019, although it has experienced a small decline in individual years. At the national level, the United States has become the global leader in nanotechnology-construction research with 63 articles, far more than other countries. Considering the income gap, developed countries play an indispensable role in the global nanotechnology-construction research system, while the role of developing countries is relatively weak. We found that the existing nanotechnology-construction research mainly focused on the fields of chemistry and materials science. According to the frequency of keywords, the research focus of nanotechnology-construction research mainly focused on the development and application of new building materials. It is concluded that with the extensive attention of researchers, the future research on nanotechnology-construction will continue to appear and increase at increasing rate.