Latest Advances and Prospects in Phase Change Materials

Dear Colleagues,

Advances in research on phase change materials have been accelerating in the last few years due to their potential in engineering, applied sciences, and basic scientific disciplines. The benefits and solutions they offer to the renewable energy landscape are behind the surge in funded research projects and publications that this topic is witnessing. At the same time, new technological applications are emerging, and sophisticated experiments, mathematical models, and access to more accurate numerical methods and greater computational power are expanding the field to new research areas unpredicted in the past.

Phase change materials (PCMs) make use of the latent heat of the solid/liquid transition to store large amounts of thermal energy during melting and release it to the environment during solidification. They allow for more compact and efficient thermal management units than using materials based on sensible heat. Significant effort is devoted to leveraging this advantage for energy storage, thermal management, waste-heat recovery, and material synthesis, leading to a vibrant field. In addition to these research fields, changes in the solid/liquid phase are at the core of several cutting-edge multiphysics technologies that are opening the field to new topics such as additive manufacturing, welding, thermoelectric generation, efficient electric vehicle batteries, PV cooling, and nanoenhanced heat-transfer fluids.

In this Special Issue, we invite for publication original research studies, review papers, experimental and numerical work, modeling, and application-based cases in topics where the solid/liquid phase change plays a distinctive role. The issue aims to provide an overarching view of the rich landscape that research on phase-change materials has created in a wide range of disciplines.

Dr. Santiago Madruga
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Applied Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• phase change materials (PCM)
• heat-transfer enhancement
• thermal energy storage (TES)
• enhancement of energy efficiency
• thermal management of batteries
• nanoenhanced PCMs
• waste-heat recovery
• welding
• alloys
• cooling/heating systems
• porous/metallic media
• slurries
• material synthesis, characterization, composites, and encapsulation
• photovoltaic–thermal
• solar chimneys, cookers, and collectors
• electronic cooling
• numerical methods (enthalpy–porosity, heat capacity, lattice boltzmann, etc.)
• machine-learning applications
• building/space conditioning