Advances in Novel Fuels—Production, Combustion, and Application: 2nd Edition

Dear Colleagues,

We have the pleasure to announce the upcoming Special Issue on “Advances in Novel Fuels—Production, Combustion, and Application: 2nd Edition” in the open access journal Energies. In our daily life, the thurst of energy, e.g., for heating, transportation, and aviation, is omnipresent and is still growing due to the rising population, further globalization and industrialization, and mobility. To combat the effects of global warming, many global efforts and initiatives are motivated by the need to identify effective pathways for providing and using energy in a sustainable way.

Thus, we need to drastically reduce the use of fossil-stemmed fuels to limit their harmful emissions and their contribution to global warming and, ultimately, to climate change. Novel and sustainable fuels and a supply of energy are required, as well as novel and efficient concepts to use them, which are ideally to be realized in the very near future. The transition will only be successful if we can all handle the associated challenges, in terms of their implementation, reliance, acceptance, and costs.

Research is unfolding in a two-fold sense, i.e., to increase the availability of appropriate sustainable fuels for energy and mobility and to provide a profound and comprehensive understanding of their use in terms of reliabilty and environmental amenity in today’s engines, gas turbines, and using today’s structures.

As a consequence, comprehensive studies should focus on emission patterns, on thermophysical and thermochemical properties, and on fundamental combustion propeties such as ignition, flame speeds, and speciation data for the neat novel fuels but also for their blends with today’s fuels, thus fostering a quick market penetration.

These areas include, but are not limited to, the following: novel and sustainable fuels; multi-component fuel blends; variation in oxidizer composition also related to the use of exhaust gas recirculation; homogeneous and inhomogeneous ignition; high-temperature regimes, as well as lower temperatures (<~1000 K); elevated pressures (> 1 bar); fuel-lean to stoichiometric and fuel-rich premixed mixtures; reaction models, both detailed and reduced; soot precursor chemistry; the design of novel fuels in terms of thermochemical and thermophysical properties and emission; production pathways; regulations; and socio-economic analysis.

The papers in this Special Issue are expected to advance our understanding of novel fuels (including conventional, alternative, and surrogate fuels) through new experimental, theoretical, life-cycle analysis, and/or kinetic modeling studies including flight campaigns and market launches, in particular. The following topics will be considered:

• Application of synthetic fuels in aviation, road transport, shipping, and power generation.
• Production pathways of sustainable fuels, including techno-economic analysis and life-cycle analysis.
• Towards market launch—demos, tests, and pilot plants.
• Test flights and flight campaigns.
• Regulations—challenges and needs.
• CFD simulations of experiments, engines, and other facilities.
• Chemical kinetic modeling including the development and validation of reaction mechanisms, both detailed and reduced, with and without artifical intelligence (AI) and machine learning.
• Generic experimental studies related to facilities such as burners, jet-stirred reactors, flow reactors, shock tubes, rapid compression machines (RCMs), engines, and gas turbines.
• Combustion—ignition, flame speed, and speciation.
• Reduction in pollutants including non-CO₂ effects.
• Studies of oxidative and pyrolytic reaction pathways including thermodynamic and transport properties, and the calculation of reaction rate expressions.

Dr. Marina Braun-Unkhoff
Dr. Sandra Richter
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 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. 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.

• synthetic sustainable fuels including e-fuels and biofuels
• aviation fuels
• maritime fuels
• fuels for road transport
• sustainable energy for power generation
• production
• market launch
• regulations
• certification and specification
• techno-economic analysis
• life-cycle analysis (LCA)
• computational fluid dynamics (CFD)
• combustion
• engine
• gas turbine
• generic experiments
• reduction in pollutants
• emissions and their impact on the environment (e.g., global warming potential—GWP non-CO₂-effects and human health)
• chemical kinetic modeling
• generation of detailed and reduced reaction models
• machine learning
• artificial intelligence

• Advances in Fuels and Combustion in Energies (12 articles)