Smart Materials ― Integrated Design, Engineering Approaches, and Potential Applications

Polymer-based smart materials have become attractive in recent years due to the fact that the polymers are flexible and provide many advantages compared to inorganic smart materials: they are low cost, they are easy to process, and they exhibit good performance at nano- and microscale.

This new volume, Smart Materials: Integrated Design, Engineering Approaches, and Potential Applications, focuses on a different class of polymers that are used as smart materials in the areas of biotechnology, medicine, and engineering. The volume aims to answer these questions: How do we distinguish ‘smart materials’? and How do they works? The chapters lay the groundwork for assimilation and exploitation of this technological advancement. Four of the key aspects of the approach that we have developed throughout this book are highlighted, namely the multidisciplinary exchange of knowledge, exploration of the relationships between multiple scales and their different behaviors, understanding that materials properties are dictated at the smallest scale, and, therefore, the recognition that macro-scale behavior can be controlled by nano-scale design.

The chapters analyze the experimental and theoretical aspects regarding the preparation, processing, designing, properties, and practical implications of advanced systems from macro- to nanoscales. The book also discusses recent advancements, research, and development prospects of smart materials that provide new solutions for advanced technologies.

Many researchers working in this field will benefit from the fundamental concepts, advanced approaches, and application of the various smart materials in biotechnology explored here. The volume will also provide a platform for scientists and graduate students to perform advanced research.

Anca Filimon, PhD, is a Scientific Researcher the Department of Physical Chemistry of Polymers at the "Petru Poni" Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry in Iasi, Romania, of the Romanian Academy. She has authored over 30 papers for peer-reviewed journals and has written several books or book chapters (as author or co-author). She has participated at several national and international conferences (as author and/or speaker), has led several some research projects, and has acted as a reviewer of several prestigious scientific journals. She is a member of the Romanian Society of Chemistry and of the Romanian Society of Rheology. Dr. Filimon’s scientific contributions include interdisciplinary research for theoretical and experimental substantiations of the processes and technologies at nano-, micro- and macro-scales. These studies have focused on the obtaining of multifunctional materials through the utilization of some polymers with special architectures (synthetic polymers/copolymers with various functional groups and polyelectrolytes, physicochemical characterized by different experimental techniques, such as viscometry, rheology, equilibrium dialysis, interferometry, refractometry, osmometry, and determination of surface tension by contact angle method), including studies concerning the improvement of some properties for predetermined goals and applications. She earned a PhD in chemistry from the Romanian Academy, Bucharest, Romania.