Clathrate hydrates are crucial from the point of view of flow assurance and future energy resources, as well as potential innovative and sustainable applications such as gas separation, CO₂ sequestration, district and data center cooling, seawater desalination, and natural gas storage. Although proof of concept has been demonstrated, significant progress is necessary in order to achieve industrial-level validation and commercialization. Most of the applications possess a common requirement of enhanced kinetics in formation and dissociation. There is a need for a broader understanding of hydrate nucleation mechanisms, cause-effect relations, and investigation techniques. The stochastic nature of hydrate nucleation, confounding cause–effect relations, and spatial-temporal scales have made it even more challenging to study nucleation. The use of hydrate promoters, novel reactor configurations such as porous media in a packed bed, and nanoparticles and hydrogels necessitates us to obtain further insights about clathrate nucleation. This review provides an in depth analysis about the characteristics of clathrate hydrate nucleation and the techniques adopted for studying nucleation from an application-oriented perspective and enables further development of clathrate technology toward future applications.

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包合物水合物成核研究综述

从流量保证和未来能源以及潜在的创新和可持续应用（例如气体分离，CO _2）的角度来看，包合物水合物至关重要。隔离，区域和数据中心冷却，海水淡化和天然气存储。尽管已经证明了概念验证，但是要实现工业级验证和商业化，仍需要取得重大进展。大多数应用都具有提高形成和解离动力学的共同要求。需要对水合物成核机理，因果关系和研究技术有更广泛的了解。水合物成核的随机性，混杂的因果关系和时空尺度使研究成核变得更具挑战性。水合物促进剂的使用，新型反应器配置（例如填充床中的多孔介质）以及纳米颗粒和水凝胶的使用，使我们需要获得有关包合物形核的更多见解。