Topic: Advanced Materials for Hydrogen and Energy Storage

Renewable energy technologies are widely recognized as essential for achieving energy security and carbon neutrality, yet their intermittent nature presents major challenges for large-scale deployment. Efficient, safe, and cost-effective energy storage is therefore critical for the reliable integration of renewable energy systems. Advanced materials underpin the storage and conversion of hydrogen, electrochemical, and thermal energy, with their performance fundamentally governed by chemical composition, structure, and synthesis.

The discovery of novel functional materials often cannot be achieved through theoretical approaches alone, underscoring the importance of continuous innovation in synthetic methodologies. Progress in energy storage materials relies on rational materials design and controlled synthesis enabled by diverse chemical approaches, including solution-based and solvothermal methods, as well as solid–gas, solid–liquid, and solid–solid reactions. In addition, emerging techniques such as mechanochemistry, high-pressure torsion, and hybrid synthetic strategies are opening new pathways toward materials with unprecedented structures and properties.

This Special Issue highlights recent advances in hydrogen production, storage, and utilization, as well as electrochemical and thermal energy storage, with particular emphasis on materials synthesis, advanced synthetic strategies, and the elucidation of structure–property relationships that underpin improved energy storage performance.

Energy storage, hydrogen production, hydrogen storage, fuel cells, rechargeable batteries, supercapacitors, thermal energy storage, materials synthesis, mechanochemistry, high-pressure torsion