Special issue on progress in renewable energy
Asia-Pacific Forum on Renewable Energy (AFORE) is an annual event for renewable energy specialists to provide the opportunities for policy, technology, education, research, marketing, and business on renewable energy and exchange their idea, to present their work, to establish network, and to develop a new vision for the cooperative future of the renewable energy in Pacific-Asia area. AFORE consists of Plenary, Keynotes, Workshops, Industrial sessions to introduce the research and development accomplished in their companies, Academic sessions and Posters. The Forum receives yearly around 300–400 research articles from over 20–30 countries.
It is widely believed that the renewable energy is one of the important and fast-growing industries intended to ensure the renewable energy needs with maximum efficiency and minimal damage to the environment. By using renewable energy sources like wind turbines, the dependence on fossil fuel gas and oil reserves can also be decreased. With all these various benefits, there are still numerous challenges that should be improved and solved.
In this regard, the 4th AFORE 2014, which was held in Yeosu, South Korea, from November 17th to 20th 2014, provided a convenient platform for the discussion of renewable energy problems for finding new ways to solve them, where scientists were welcome to attend AFORE from around the world such as Canada, Nigeria, Japan, China, Taiwan, Nepal, Yemen, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Pakistan, India, Thailand, Fiji, Sri Lanka, Czech Republic, and so on. AFORE 2014 gave the opportunity for all participants to present their developments and their opinion in such areas such as the wind energy, solar energy, hydrogen, fuel cell, and other renewable energy areas. The effectiveness of this Forum has been shown by the huge amount of the interesting presentations with the fruitful discussions. We believe that the AFORE 2014 caused greater interest to the renewable energy and help in solving of the important global problems.
We have had many submissions of outstanding and qualified research articles from AFORE 2014 to be published in the International Journal of Energy Research. However, only 15 articles (i.e., 14 research papers and 1 review article) by a strict reviewing process are accepted for publication in the International Journal of Energy Research. In fact, this special issue consists of 15 papers that are selected from 350 papers of AFORE 2014.
The accepted papers are in the field of renewable energy policy (one paper), tidal energy (three papers), heat recovery (one paper), wind energy (three papers), geothermal energy (one paper), solar energy (two papers), energy storage systems (two papers), smart grid (one paper), and bioenergy (one paper). To be exact, these accepted papers cover the topics in renewable portfolio standard in Korea, tidal turbines development of the turbomachinery for the supercritical carbon dioxide power cycle, hydrodynamic performance of horizontal axis tidal current turbine and desalination of sea water, optimization of blade setting angles of a counter-rotating type horizontal axis tidal turbine using response surface methodology and experimental validation, effects of non-torque loads on a 3-point suspension gearbox for wind turbines, experiment for the effects of the distance and rotational direction of two neighboring vertical Savonius blades, load characteristics of NREL 5-MW offshore wind turbines with different substructures, optimum operation of open-loop ground heat exchanger considering subsurface temperature gradient Cu2ZnSnS4 solar cells with a single spin-coated absorber layer prepared via a simple sol–gel route, optimized cell conditions for a high-energy density large-scale Li-S battery, improved performance of inverted polymer solar cells using pentacene, efficient energy storage method by multistage pump of the energy storage system using CFD, design of communication architecture in a distributed energy resource system using IEC 61850 standard, and life cycle assessment of diesel production from crude palm oil and waste cooking oil via pyrolysis.
We hope that this special issue will be of great help for many researchers and practitioners. We also would like to thank Prof. Ibrahim Dincer, the Editor-in-Chief, for his great support and effort throughout the whole publication process. We are also grateful to the referees for their professional and timely reviews.
