Hydrogels: Recent Advances (Gels Horizons: From Science to Smart Materials)

This book discusses recent advances in hydrogels, including their generation and applications and presents a compendium of fundamental concepts. It highlights the most important hydrogel materials, including physical hydrogels, chemical hydrogels, and nanohydrogels and explores the development of hydrogel-based novel materials that respond to external stimuli, such as temperature, pressure, pH, light, biochemicals or magnetism, which represent a new class of intelligent materials. With their multiple cooperative functions, hydrogel-based materials exhibit different potential applications ranging from biomedical engineering to water purification systems. This book covers key topics including superabsorbent polymer hydrogel; intelligent hydrogels for drug delivery; hydrogels from catechol-conjugated materials; nanomaterials loaded hydrogel; electrospinning of hydrogels; biopolymers-based hydrogels; injectable hydrogels; interpenetrating-polymer-network hydrogels: radiation- and sonochemical synthesis of micro/nano/macroscopic hydrogels; DNA-based hydrogels; and multifunctional applications of hydrogels. It will prove a valuable resource for researchers working in industry and academia alike.

Dr. Vijay Kumar Thakur is currently a Permanent Faculty in the School of Aerospace, Transport and Manufacturing , Cranfield University, UK. Some of his other prior significant appointments include being a Research Scientist in Temasek Laboratories at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (2009-2012) and a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering at LHU–Taiwan. He spent his postdoctoral study in Materials Science & Engineering at Iowa State University, USA and received Ph.D. in Polymer Chemistry (2009). In the course of his academic career, he has published more than 100 SCI journal research articles in the field of chemical sciences/materials science and holds one US patent. Among these, ten of his research papers have been highlighted as “Highly Cited Papers” in Web of Science (less than 1% of published papers receive this ranking), while three others have been highlighted as “Hot Papers” (Hot papers are selected

Dr. Manju Kumari Thakur has been working as an assistant professor of Chemistry at the Division of Chemistry, Himachal Pradesh University, Shimla, India since June 2010. She received her B.Sc. in Chemistry, Botany andZoology; M.Sc., M. Phil in Organic Chemistry and Ph.D. in Polymer Chemistry from the Chemistry Department at Himachal Pradesh University, Shimla, INDIA. She has broad experience in the field of organic chemistry, biopolymers, composites/nanocomposites, hydrogels, applications of hydrogels in the removal of toxic heavy metal ions, drug delivery, etc. She has published more than 30 research papers in several international journals, has co-authored three books, and has also published 25 book chapters in the field of polymeric materials.