Contributions in renewable energy systems: A perspective from the latest publications of FCSE

The Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE) has been conducting Engineering Fronts Projects for three years since 2017, which aim of the future development directions of engineering science and technology. The potential Research Fronts topics were obtained by Clarivate Analytics, which based on the cocitation clustering method and clustered the top 10% highly cited papers in the Web of Science Core Collection. “Renewable Energy System” got voting No. 1 in this project in 2019 in the field group of Chemical, Metallurgical, and Materials Engineering [1]. Among all 190 papers on this topic there are 8 papers got more than 100 citations in the Web of Science Core Collection [2–9]. Renewable energy (RE) is generated from natural processes that are continuously replenished, which typically refers to energy resources like wind, solar, biomass, hydropower, geothermal, and ocean energy. Today, the integration of RE into energy and chemical industries is increasingly studied and practiced, becoming a new trend of research in chemical science and engineering. Chemical science and engineering play critical roles in the upgrading of the global economy and society by offering multiple energies and chemicals. However, enormous benefits contributed by the modern energy and chemical industries are accompanied by several major challenges including depletion of fossil fuels, environmental pollutions, and global warming [10,11]. Therefore, significant efforts have been made over the past decades in realizing more sustainable energy and chemical technologies and processes, which are characterized by introducing renewable energy resources to replace fossil fuels. As a journal concerning the latest progress in sustainable technologies and green processing, Frontiers of Chemical Science and Engineering (FCSE) could provide readers with valuable information in the domain of renewable energy and chemical systems, including producing chemicals and energies for the resources utilization, as well as developing devices and materials for the energy storage (Fig. 1). In this regard, we present three categories for indicating the contributions of chemical science and engineering (published by FCSE) in renewable energy systems.