Thermal Engineering Journal (JOTEA): Scope, Indexing and How to Publish in 2026

Heat moves through everything we build. A data centre that cannot shed it throttles. An engine that wastes it burns more fuel. A solar plant that stores it badly loses half its value overnight. Thermal engineering sits underneath all of it, and the research keeps coming faster than most venues can absorb.

If you work on heat exchangers, waste heat recovery, CFD thermal analysis or energy systems, the Journal of Thermal Engineering and Applications (JOTEA) is worth a look. It is a peer-reviewed, hybrid open access thermal engineering journal published since 2014 by STM Journals, focused on rapid publication of fundamental research across the field.

Here is what it publishes, who runs it, and how to get your paper in.

What JOTEA Covers

JOTEA was launched in 2014 for one reason: thermal engineering research was being split across mechanical, energy and chemical engineering journals, and a lot of good applied work had nowhere obvious to go. The thermal engineering journal takes papers across the whole field rather than a narrow slice of it.

Every paper gets a DOI, so your work stays citable and trackable whatever happens to the site structure later.

You can read the complete Focus and Scope on the journal page.

The Research Areas That Actually Get Published

Scope statements tend to be generous. A better guide is what the journal has actually run recently. Across the last two volumes, the work in this thermal engineering journal clusters into five areas

Heat Exchanger Design and Enhancement

Heat exchangers are this thermal engineering journal’s busiest area. Double pipe exchangers, micro-tube exchangers, dimpled surfaces, fin geometry — anything where the question is how to move more heat through the same hardware. Both experimental and CFD-based studies appear regularly.

Waste Heat Recovery

Industrial exhaust streams throw away enormous amounts of usable energy. Papers on thermoelectric recovery, nanostructured hybrid exchangers and recovery system design fit here, and the area is growing as energy efficiency targets tighten.

Renewable and Hybrid Energy Systems

Solar, wind and hybrid configurations, including grid-connected systems and inverter control. The journal’s subject classification is Thermal Engineering, but applied energy systems work is clearly welcome.

Thermal Analysis and Simulation

ANSYS, SOLIDWORKS and general CFD studies — steam generator characterisation, structural-thermal coupling, cooling system modelling. If your contribution is computational, this thermal engineering journal has an established track record of publishing it.

Cooling and Thermal Management

Engine cooling, dehumidification, electronics thermal management and extended surface design. Practical, applied work with a clear use case.

Recent Papers

Four examples from recent issues, to give you a concrete sense of what gets accepted.

Thermoelectric Waste Heat Recovery from Industrial Exhaust Systems Using Nanostructured Hybrid Heat Exchangers — Ganthia and Pradhan treat industrial waste heat as an efficiency problem rather than an unavoidable loss, combining thermoelectric generation with nanostructured exchanger surfaces.

Passive Augmentation Studies in a Double Pipe Heat Exchanger with Ellipsoidal Dimples — Soman and colleagues run numerical studies on inward-facing ellipsoidal dimples on the inner tube of a counter-current exchanger, using SOLIDWORKS. A clean example of passive enhancement work.

Designing and Analysis of Different Types of Fins in Air Cooled Engine — Bora and Adlakha compare fin geometries on IC engine cylinder heads through thermal and CFD analysis. Straightforward applied work, well scoped.

Multiphysics Simulation and Thermal Characterization of VVER-1200 Steam Generator — Shanta and co-authors model the vertical steam generator of a VVER-1200 reactor in ANSYS, looking at both heat transfer and structural integrity.

Notice the pattern: specific system, defined method, measurable outcome. None of these are broad surveys.

Indexing and Metrics

JOTEA is indexed in Google Scholar, Advanced Science Index, Index Copernicus, Scientific Literature (SCILIT), IJIF and SJIF.

Its Index Copernicus Value was 56.07 in 2022. SJIF has held near 6.0 for five years:

Be clear-eyed about what this means. SJIF and ICV are not Clarivate’s Journal Impact Factor, and JOTEA is not currently in Web of Science or Scopus. If your institution counts only WoS or Scopus indexed publications, check your own requirements before submitting. If your priority is getting solid applied thermal engineering work published and discoverable through Google Scholar within a reasonable timeframe, this journal does that job.

Who Runs the Journal

The Editor-in-Chief is Dr. Shailendra Kumar Shukla, Professor and founder coordinator at the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), Varanasi. That matters more than most indexing badges: an IIT professor in mechanical engineering handling thermal submissions means your paper is read by someone who understands the subject rather than a generalist.

The board includes practising researchers from institutions worldwide, and manuscripts are assigned to editors with relevant expertise.

How to Submit

Start with scope. Read the Focus and Scope page and confirm your paper is genuinely thermal. Papers on pure electrical systems or general mechanical design without a heat transfer component get desk rejected.

Format to the guidelines. The Author Guidelines and Instructions for Authors specify structure, reference style and figure requirements. Papers that follow them move faster.

Submit through the portal. Upload your manuscript, abstract, keywords and supplementary files via the manuscript submission system. You can track status and message the editorial office from there.

Respond properly to review. When revisions come back, reply point by point. A revision that addresses three of seven comments and ignores the rest goes back for another round.

Check the APC. As a hybrid open access journal, JOTEA charges a processing fee for open access publication. Details are on the Article Processing Charges page.

Before You Submit: A Short Checklist

Thermal papers get rejected for predictable reasons. Work through these first.

• Boundary conditions stated in full. Inlet temperature, flow rate, pressure, wall condition. A CFD study without them cannot be reproduced.
• Mesh independence demonstrated. If your result changes with cell count, it is not a result. Show the study.
• Validation against something real. Published experimental data or an accepted correlation. Simulation alone is not evidence.
• Baseline comparison included. Your enhanced exchanger needs the plain one next to it, under the same conditions.
• Pressure drop reported alongside heat transfer. Enhancement that triples pumping power is not an improvement, and reviewers will ask.
• Uncertainty quantified for experimental work — instrument accuracy and propagated error.
• Units consistent throughout, including figure axes.
• References current. Thermal engineering moves; a reference list stopping at 2015 reads as dated.

Conclusion

JOTEA is not trying to be a flagship international title, and the blog post that pretends otherwise would be doing you a disservice. What it is: a focused, decade-old thermal engineering journal with an IIT (BHU) professor as Editor-in-Chief, a clear applied scope, DOI assignment on every paper, and three issues a year that consistently publish heat exchanger, waste heat recovery and thermal simulation work.

For a PhD scholar who needs a peer-reviewed publication on a defined timeline, a faculty member reporting incremental but solid experimental results, or an engineer sharing applied findings that a general mechanical journal would call too narrow, that is a good fit.

If that describes your work, read the author guidelines, run through the checklist above, and submit your manuscript.

Frequently Asked Questions

Frequently Asked Questions