Smart Materials and Devices for Energy Saving and Harvesting

Dear Colleagues,

Nowadays, energy harvesting and saving by means of innovative materials represent a challenge for researchers. In this compelling roadmap, smart materials may play a pivotal role, providing exciting performances and properties, as well as the chance to enhance design opportunities and energy saving through fabrication and operation. Smart materials are defined as highly engineered materials that respond intelligently to their environment with a specialized performance, so as to meet specific users’ needs in a reversible fashion.

Since the beginning of these research activities, worldwide, several classes of materials and devices have been widely proposed and investigated, showing reversibly adaptive properties, namely: shape memory materials, piezoelectric materials; chromogenics; new materials for more efficient solar energy conversion; electro-active polymers for energy harvesting, just to cite some. This Special Issue could help collect contributions of particular scientific results.

It is our pleasure to invite you to contribute to this Special Issue with your valuable manuscripts, sending full papers, reviews, and communications dealing with the design, characterization, and modeling of smart materials and devices for energy saving, for a very wide readership.

Hereafter, a non-exhaustive list of the main topics proposed for this Special Issue is reported:

• Energy harvesting and saving;
• Chromogenics, mechanotropics, mechanochromics, PCMs, piezoelectrics, and EAPs;
• Modelling and simulation of smart materials;
• Properties and characterization of smart materials and devices.

Dr. Alessandro Cannavale
Prof. Dr. Ubaldo Ayr
Guest Editors

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 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

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-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Energies 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 2600 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.