Fuel Cells in 2023: Highlights and transitions

Abstract

Welcome to the first issue of Fuel Cells in 2023. This is shaping up to be an exciting year for the journal! Before we discuss our plans further and share some exciting news, we'd like to look back at some highlights from the previous year.

The final issue of the year was a Special Issue, covering the 25th edition of the European Electrolyser & Fuelcell Forum (2021) in Lucerne, Switzerland. Figure 1 shows the front cover of this issue. That this meeting took place at all, given the disruptions caused to everyday life by the COVID19 pandemic, was a highlight in itself! As the guest editorial described, due to these disruptions the meeting was held—successfully—as a fully virtual event. From the 157 papers presented at the event, seven were selected for publication in the issue. The subjects covered in these published papers included visualization inside proton exchange membranes, catalyst degradation, and fuel cells for mobile applications. Other subjects discussed in the issue include the effects of accelerated durability testing on polymer electrolyte membranes, hydraulic single-cell compression testing, the integration of water electrolyzers into renewable energy sources, and an optimal sustainable fuel cell stack. We are extremely grateful to the organizers of this conference and the guest editors of the special issue, both for their collaboration with Fuel Cells and for ensuring this meeting took place despite the challenges involved.

Of course, there was no shortage of excellent content in the other issues of 2022. A review of energy management in hybrid fuel cell systems was published in issue 4, while research on lanthanum nickelate as an oxygen electrode in electrolysis cells and work on dual-region mass transport in proton exchange membranes were among the primary research highlights published, read, and cited in 2022. Naturally, work published in previous years is also still being read and cited too; see Table 1 for the top 10 most accessed articles, evergreen and newly published, from January to December 2022. The appeal of the articles published in the journal was clearly seen with the publication of the latest Journal Citation Reports in June. Fuel Cells earned an Impact Factor of 2.9, an increase of nearly 24% and a great result for the journal. Without the authors, reviewers, and readers who have supported the journal in the past year and beyond, none of this success would be possible. Thank you all so much!

Lastly, as promised, we have some news to share, both sad and exciting. To begin, our long-standing Editor-in-Chief, Professor Ulrich Stimming, will step down later this year. We are of course sad to see him go, but he goes with our great gratitude and respect, and we are pleased to announce that he will continue to be involved with the journal as the Founding Editor. We are also pleased to announce that Professor Eileen Yu of Loughborough University, UK, will step up from the Editorial Board to become our new Editor-in-Chief. Professor Yu obtained her PhD at Newcastle University with ground-breaking work on direct methanol alkaline fuel cells and took a role at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems, Germany, before returning to Newcastle for a prestigious EPSRC Research Fellowship (Life Science Interface). She now holds a Chair of Electrochemical Engineering in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Loughborough, where she focuses on science at the interface between fuel cell chemistry and bioscience, involving novel bioelectrochemical systems for healthcare, CO2 utilization, energy, and environmental applications.

You can have no doubt that we will have further changes to share as part of this process, the first being that our Associate Editor, Dr. Petra Bele, will take a more senior editorial role during this transition, to better support Professor Yu as our new EiC. We are very excited to see how things will develop in 2023 and of course to continue the excellence of Fuel Cells into this new year.

All the best,

The Fuel Cells Editorial Team