Significant efforts are ongoing to develop newer sources of energy to meet the growing demand of global population. Even though the energy consumption may vary from one country to another, it is directly related to the economic development aimed at enhancing the quality of public life. Materials play important roles in successful development and implementation of diverse energy sources. It should, however, be noted that the majority of today’s energy demand is met from nuclear and fossil energy sources. Therefore, this publication will be focused on structural materials currently in use for such applications. It is well known that these materials may become susceptible to either mechanical or environmental degradation or a combination of both during exploration, development, and processing of energy. Thus, it is necessary that the identification and characterisation of existing materials for such applications be routinely assessed to develop basic understanding on different types of degradation modes. Eventually, emphasis would be placed on developing newer alloys to circumvent these problems. Analyses of the resultant data using sophisticated tools and development of predictive models will, therefore, lead to judicious selection of materials having the desired mechanical, metallurgical, and other relevant properties. The different types of energy sources being considered in this special issue are the following.

This special issue is aimed at presenting articles encompassing identification and selection, processing and characterization, establishing structure-property relationship, and computational high throughput studies on existing materials and future alloys to be developed, for above applications. Professionals involved in both materials research and process and quality control activities in academic institutions and industrial organizations are anticipated to participate through publications of their pioneering research and investigative work including review papers.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Nuclear power (very high temperature reactors)
• Fossil energy
  • Deep oil and gas wells
  • Geothermal wells
  • Coal-fired thermal power plants (supercritical and ultra-supercritical)