Self-Regulating Materials: Design, Fabrication and Applications

Dear Colleagues,

Living organisms can actively adapt to changing environmental conditions in order to minimize changes to their internal conditions. Transferring this key feature to artificial materials is one of the most ambitious goals of state-of-art materials science. The diverse challenges faced by contemporary society (including increased energy demand, widespread pollution, aging of population and reduction of natural resources), urge the development of “smart” materials, able to actively interact and adapt to the surrounding environment instead of being passively subjected to it (as is the case for more conventional stimuli-responsive materials). Embedding computational power is a fundamental step forward in this direction: in smart materials, physico-chemical qualities such as color, mechanical properties, composition and texture are intrinsically coupled with the ability to acquire data (i.e. to sense), analyze them and respond accordingly. Research on such kind of materials not only have tantalizing potential applications (e.g. to reduce the energy consumption of buildings for heating and ventilation), they could also help shine light on more fundamental problems, including those connected to the origin of life. The impact that self-regulating materials could have for society at large can be deduced from already reported examples: thermo-sensitive electrolytes for rechargeable metal-ion batteries that would switch off to avoid overheating and then switch back on when the temperature has decreased to a safe value; magnetic materials for in vivo hyperthermia treatments that would automatically switch off to avoid overheating and damaging healthy cells; implantable materials for drug delivery that would release their cargo (e.g. insulin for diabetic patients) only when needed; and much more.

The goal of this Special Issue is to provide an outlook of exciting research directions, both theoretical and real-world, on the design, fabrication strategies and applications of artificial self-regulating materials across the scales, from test-tubes to buildings.

Dr. Guido Panzarasa
Guest Editor

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