Graphene-Based Polymer Nanocomposites

Materials science continues to occupy a central place in our lives primarily through the design and creation of new materials, and our quality of life has improved over time thanks to the discovery of new materials. Major milestones in the advancement of our society are intimately associated with materials throughout history: the stone age, bronze age, iron age, steel age (industrial revolution), silicon age and silica age (telecom revolution) all reflect the important impact materials have in our civilization, and our daily life in the 21st century depends on an unlimited variety of materials of varying degrees of sophistication. Also, since our world is dominated by a consumer market, the demands to improve our lifestyle are without limit. Materials are fundamental to the technology that adds convenience to our lives, examples being laptop computers, digital cell phones, touch screens, and so on. Therefore, the challenge of creating new, more useful and diverse materials grows with the needs of society, and the limitations for covering needs such as sustainable energy, affordable health care, personal protection, etc., are closely related to constraints in the properties of materials. One critical aspect for achieving materials with new improved properties is imaginative molecular design, synthesis and preparation of new materials. Materials chemistry focuses on understanding the relationships between the arrangement of atoms, ions or molecules comprising a material and its overall bulk structural/physical properties. Thus, it consists in the study of the structure and properties of existing materials, the synthesis and characterization of new or improved materials, and the use of advanced computational techniques to predict structures and properties of materials that have not yet been made. Since our demands are renewed continuously and new needs emerge daily, for further progress to meet present and future requirements a thorough understanding of existing materials and the tailor-making of new functional materials must be continued with increasing vigour. Nowadays, in the frontiers of materials technology the concept of combining various types of materials through synergy is one of the most successful approaches to achieve specific goals with the greatest efficiency in properties and cost effectiveness. In this respect, polymers are one of the most successfully exploited classes of materials due to the incredible variety of chemical structures available and their subsequent compendium of properties, along with their relatively low cost, facile processing, and their possible recyclability and applicability as sustainable materials. The area of polymer nanocomposites (PNCs) has grown to represent one of the largest classes within the scope of materials science, becoming