Materials for Thermal Safety Enhancement in Energy Industries

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Background

Energy is a basic essential human society needs. Energy use has dramatically increased for agriculture, transportation, built environment, information technology, and communication, etc. However, this century has witnessed many devastating thermal safety accidents during energy production and utilization, which has become a key constraint on the promotion and application of energy, especially new energy. Traditional energy such as coal and oil may self-ignite or leak, leading to fire or pollution. The new energy, such as lithium-ion batteries and hydrogen, may fall into thermal runaway, fire, and even explosion. It is essential to develop safer materials to replace hazardous components or bring up new and safe functional materials to detect and prevent energy safety-related problems. It is crucial to harness knowledge in this regard to deal with the thermal safety issues during energy production and utilization.

After the occurrence of thermal accidents, such as thermal runaway, leakage, fire, and even explosion, emergency treatments can retard the accident evolution and mitigate the loss. The safety functional materials are foremost to develop more efficient safety technologies. Some structural or functional materials with obvious safety or environmental hazards are substituted by new intrinsically safer material candidates. The high-performance and reliable emergency response and disposal materials, such as hazard signal sensor, flame retardant, adsorbent, fire extinguishant and explosion protection materials, have attracted tremendous interest in recent years. These researches of safety functional materials in the energy field are mainly in the laboratory or at a very early stage of industrialization. The large-scale verification experiments must be carried out on these safety technologies.
This Research Topic aims to attract the latest progress around thermal safety issues and seek approaches to alleviate the thermal risk during the energy production, storage, transition, and utilization, etc. It faces the traditional energies such as coal, oil and gas, and the topics related to new, renewable and sustainable energies are also welcome, such as lithium-ion battery, hydrogen, solar energy, wind energy and nuclear energy. It focuses on all kinds of materials for thermal safety enhancement in energy industries, including safer components that can replace initial dangerous materials, safe additives, thermal management materials, self-healing materials, safety detecting and early warning materials, and fire and explosion prevention materials.

This Research Topic welcomes Original Research, Reviews, and Mini Review on topics including, but not limited to, the following:
• Thermal safety-related materials for traditional energies such as mine, gas, petrol, etc.
• Thermal safety-related materials for new energies or their carriers such as lithium-ion battery, hydrogen, nuclear energies, etc.
• Thermal safety-related materials for renewable and sustainable energies such as solar, biomass, etc.
• Synthesis, fabrication, structure, properties, performance, and technological application, in addition to the strategies and policies of thermal safety-related materials and their devices.
• Emerging hazards of new thermal safety-related materials and their risk assessment.

Keywords: energy safety-related material, thermal safety, fire, explosion, risk assessment

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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