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

Polymer-based smart materials have become attractive in recent years due to the fact that 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 levels.

This volume 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 work? The chapters lay the groundwork for assimilation and exploitation of this technological advancement. Four of the key aspects of the approach that the authors 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 material properties are dictated at the smallest scale, and, therefore, the recognition that macroscale behavior can be controlled by nanoscale design.

Anca Filimon, PhD, is a Scientific Researcher in the Department of Physical Chemistry of Polymers at the “Petru Poni” Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry, Iasi, Romania, of the Romanian Academy. She has authored over 30 papers for peer-reviewed journals and has written several books and book chapters (as author or co-author). She has participated at national and international conferences (as author and/or speaker), has led several research projects, and has acted as 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 are situated at the interdisciplinary interface of polymer chemistry, physics, and biochemistry, and include theoretical and experimental substantiations of the processes and technologies at nano-, micro- and macroscales. Her research is focused on the development of new strategies to achieve the complex architectures with well-defined functionality and various applications. The traditional synthesis tools, new theoretical and experimental physico-chemical approaches, surface science, and biopolymer engineering are combined to realize the design of targeted materials. She earned her PhD in chemistry from the Romanian Academy, “Petru Poni” Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry, Iasi, Romania.