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With the enhancement of environmental protection awareness of the international community and the continuous promotion of green and sustainable development of manufacturing industry, water lubrication instead of mineral oil has become the future development trend due to its green, pollution-free, clean, safe, and sustainable advantages especially in ships, marine, coal mining, and other fields. In recent years, with the rapid development of water lubrication research, significant progress has been made in related research knowledge domain and discipline. A systematic and extensive assessment of water lubrication research has become increasingly important. The objective of this research is to reveal the research status, research hotspots, and development trends in the field of water lubrication. Therefore, CiteSpace was used to conduct a systematic bibliometric and scientometrical analysis of 1,792 publications from Web of Science core collection database (1997–2021). The results show that China and USA are the most productive countries in the field of water lubrication and have made outstanding contributions. Through the analysis of hot key words and co-citation references, this paper reviews the research status of water lubrication in three aspects: (1) lubricating medium modification; (2) material preparation; (3) surface optimization. It has become a research hotspot to promote the superlubricity contact interface and the application of nanotechnology. The results of this study can make a significant contribution to the development of water lubrication by providing a comprehensive understanding of the research status and research hotspots in this field. Personal understanding and discussion of research hotspots and research status are expected to provide insights into future research trends. In addition, this study will provide valuable references and guidelines for researchers who are interested in this field.

Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) has been widely used in industrial field for sealing parts. However, it is well known that PTFE is always subject to serious wear at high temperature (over 150 °C), which has become the main drawback limiting serve life of important equipment such as compressors. In this paper, a new solution is proposed for improving the wear resistance of carbon fibers-reinforced PTFE (CFRPTFE). Multilayer Ti-TiCx/DLC film is prepared and used as the counterface of CFRPTFE. Friction and wear tests at high temperature (200 °C and 250 °C) are carried out. The uncoated 17-4PH steel disks precisely polished by abrasive papers with different grain sizes are used as the reference counterface (SS80 and SS7000). It is found that by sliding against Ti-TiCx/DLC film, the tribological behaviors of CFRPTFE at high temperature can be improved. The friction coefficient between CFRPTFE and DLC under different test conditions can be kept in stable state. The wear rates of CFRPTFE reduce by 50%–70% compared to SS80, and reduction of 20%–40% can be observed when compared to SS7000. It can be found that graphitization transition at high temperature promotes the transfer layer formation and contributes to lower friction and lower wear compared to traditional processed counterface at high temperature. These significant improvements can prolong the lifetime of CFRPTFE moving parts used in high-temperature and heavy-load applications. Finally, engineering verification of the proposed friction pair is carried out in miniature oil-free high-pressure compressor.