Recent advances in soft functional materials: preparation, functions and applications

Abstract

This review discusses the recent progress of three kinds of soft materials, namely gels, foams and elastomers, with emphasis on materials, properties and applications in flexible sensors, soft actuators, energy convention and storage.

Investigation of the Mechanism Behind Conductive Fluorescent and Multistimuli‐responsive Li+‐enriched Metallogel Formation

“…Gels are well known smart materials, gathered alluring importance in the recent past due to their divergent and interdisciplinary applications . Such smart materials, when subjected to external stimuli e. g .…”

“…Such smart materials, when subjected to external stimuli e. g . pH, temperature, light, sound and chemicals, usually undergo reversible gel‐sol transition . As a result of their responsiveness towards a variety of external stimuli, supramolecular gels find important applications in the field of catalysis, drug delivery, tissue engineering, sensing and light harvesting .…”

Programming properties of transient hydrogels by an enzymatic reaction

“…Supramolecular gels are formed when monomeric building blocks self-assemble into long fibrous structures that entrap solvent molecules. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7] Generally, man-made selfassembly is an energetically down-hill process and so selfassembled gels can be formed under thermodynamic equilibrium. [8][9][10][11] However, depending on the preparative pathway, self-assembled gels may exist as kinetically trapped structures where the assembly structures reside in the local thermodynamic minimum in the free energy landscape.…”

Supramolecular Dimerization in a Polymer Melt from Small-Angle X-ray Scattering and Rheology: A Miscible Model System

“…During use they are subjected to fatigue, impact, abrasion and wear that cause the formation of minuscule fractures leading to further larger-scale unrepairable failures and to a limited lifetime. Therefore, transferring self-repair concepts from living matter to synthetic elastomers would represent a great benefit for extending the service intervals of rubber-based components or even for reaching new advanced materials [7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. Designing such novel materials for the future is an interdisciplinary process and requires the joint efforts of microscopic and macroscopic studies of the fundamental underlying principles [14].…”

“…They would tend to microphase separation or micellarization in the melt and introduce new time dependencies in their properties that are linked to the morphology and structure of hydrogen-bonding nanodomains, rather than to the H-bond itself. Many examples of such randomly or terminally functionalized polymers with hydrogen-bonding interactions in solution and bulk state can be found in the literature [11,13,[19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27]. In the present context, ionomers also structurally resemble the phase separation [28][29][30].…”