Trends and future perspectives on the integration of phase change materials in heat exchangers

Abstract Traditional review papers provide mainly qualitative information, missing to show the volume, trends, and major contributions in a topic. In response to that, this paper asseses both quantitative and qualitative information regarding the implementation of thermal energy storage using phase change materials in heat exchangers. The data were retrieved from the Scopus database using specific queries relevant to the topic. To investigate the state-of-the-art and research gaps, a keywords analysis was carried out highlighting relevant connections among the major keywords. Moreover, a bibliometric analysis was performed to obtain the trends on the number of publications per year, type of document, authors, affiliation, geographical distribution, journals of publication, and subject areas of research. Based on the keywords and bibliometric analyses, this paper highlights the major contributions and research gaps on the topic.