Continually using fossil fuels as the main source for producing electricity is one of the main factors causing global warming. Through the past years, several efforts have been made, looking for sustainable, environmentally friendly, and clean energy alternatives. Harvesting geothermal energy from roadway pavement is one of the alternatives that have been developed and investigated recently. Herein, a systematic review and bibliometric analysis were conducted to provide a comprehensive overview of the potentials of harvesting thermal energy from asphalt pavement and to assess the level of achievement being attained towards developed technologies. A total of 713 articles were initially collected, considering the period between 2006 and 2021; later, a series of filtration processes were performed to reach 47 publications. The thermal energy harvesting technologies were categorized into three main sectors, at which their basics and principles were discussed. In addition, a detailed description of the systems’ configurations, materials, and efficiency was presented and described. Finally, gaps and future directions were summarized at the end of this paper. The fundamental knowledge introduced herein can inspire researchers to detect research gaps and serve as a wake-up call to motivate them to explore the high potentials of utilizing pavements as a clean and sustainable energy source.

Even though water is a renewable resource, the majority of the available water on the planet is unfit for human use. Moreover, the drinkable water demand is ever-increasing as a result of rising population, urbanization, and life standards, which makes the needs for sustainable, economic, and environment-friendly treatment alternatives of utmost importance. Seawater desalination using solar stills has been proposed as a promising alternative that may help to solve drinkable water scarcity issues. In the past decades, many studies have been conducted to assess the performance of different types of solar stills aiming to enhance their productivity. Computational fluid dynamic (CFD) numerical simulation is one of the approaches that have been used recently to assess the performance of solar stills. The present study performed a systematic review and bibliometric analysis to provide a comprehensive overview of CFD numerical simulation uses as a tool to assess solar stills performance. A total of 486 publications were collected initially from different databases for the period between 2012 and 2022. The collected publications were filtered through several stages reaching 43 publications of highest significance. The collected data were analyzed descriptively, and the bibliometric mapping was presented. Furthermore, the basics and principles of CFD numerical simulation of solar stills efficiency were described and discussed. Later, the previous studies were analyzed to understand the algorithms, methods, and still types used. Finally, future research scopes and conclusions were stated. The presented knowledge in this study can help to provide a deep overview of using CFD in studying the efficiency of solar stills and inspire researchers to identify future research ways and gaps.

Natural hazard threats have grown as a result of climate change, fast demographic development, and major urbanization. Devastating floods have occurred in several areas of the world recently, including the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which is located in a region with a dry environment. In arid or semi-arid regions, rapidly forming flash floods associated with debris flowing down over dry water courses leading to a potential threat to both lives and property. Being located at the coastal plain of western Saudi Arabia, Jeddah City has witnessed an unexpected amount of rainfall events in recent years. Such extreme rainfall events, integrated with other factors, namely topography, land use, surface runoff, etc., have led to flood generation, which is alarming indeed. Herein, this paper addresses the varying climatic classifications of the Kingdom, its risk and vulnerability, followed by reasoning about the impact of flash flood events and the associated casualties and property losses. Further, it reports about the existing strategies of the government and proposes a systematic way forward on how to alleviate such events in future. Thus, risk variables have been discovered and integrated in the context of climate change and rising anthropogenic strain on coastal communities to give planners and decision makers tools to assure effective and appropriate flood risk management.

Watercourses and roadways commonly intersect in their layout at many locations through bridges, drainages, and fords. During heavy rain events, watercourses may overflow causing serious disturbance toward traffic movement. Under such circumstances, attempting to drive through these intersections can be extremely dangerous. Therefore, understanding the responses of the vehicles moving through floodwaters is of utmost importance. Between 1967 and 2021, several studies have been published investigating the stability of static flooded vehicles. However, studies on the stability of vehicles in the movement are not sufficient at which only few experimental studies were published. Herein, for the very first time numerical simulations were conducted to investigate the hydrodynamic forces on a full‐scale medium‐size passenger vehicle moving perpendicular to the incoming floodwaters. Sliding and floating instability modes were observed by detecting the position of the vehicle centre of mass at each time step. Further, horizontal (F_H) and vertical (F_V) forces were measured and plotted against the governing flow parameters. Finally, it was observed that the critical flow depth was 0.38 m, while the minimum threshold function was 0.39 m²/s, for the tested vehicle. Later, a comparison between simulation outcomes and previously published experimental work was performed and a good agreement was observed.