The present manuscript offers an overview of the current state of affairs within the research field of adaptive and environmentally sensitive polymer surfaces designed to respond to external stimuli in a controlled and predictable manner. Intensive study in the field of the adaptive/responsive surfaces began several decades ago in an attempt to understand relationships between bulk properties/c...

The area of smart materials is a hot topic as it allows access to adaptive/responsive materials with selfhealing, shape memory, or actuation behavior. Indeed, scientists can make all manner of materials on-scale with controllable and remarkable properties, but designing materials with mechanical adaptability is much more challenging. Although the sea cucumber might seem like an unlikely source ...

Stimuli−responsive polymers respond with large property changes to small physical or chemical stimuli. These functional polymers are known as “smart”, “intelligent”, “stimuli−responsive”, or “environmentally sensitive” polymers. They can take many forms: they may be dissolved in aqueous solution, adsorbed or grafted on aqueous−solid interfaces, or cross−linked in the form of hydrogels. Many dif...

The aim of this paper is to present research dedicated to the elaboration of novel, miniaturized flexible temperature sensors for textronic applications. Examined sensors were manufactured on a single yarn, which ensures their high flexibility and good compatibility with textiles. Stable and linear characteristics were obtained by special technological process and applied temperature profiles. ...

Molecular imprinting is a method of inducing molecular recognition properties in synthetic polymers in response to the presence of a template species during formation of the three-dimensional structure of the polymer. The molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) prepared in this way have been termed "plastic antibodies" and combine the robustness of the polymer scaffold with binding properties mor...

We have designed an inexpensive and sensitive mechanochromic system. Our system is prepared by a simple emulsion procedure of nematic liquid crystal in polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). The resulting polymer dispersed liquid crystal (PDLC) exhibits a transmission change of 50% as a response to strain. Here we characterize the morphological, optical, and mechanical factors behind this transmission ch...

Recently, smart polymer vesicles have attracted increasing interest due to their endless potential applications such as tunable delivery vehicles for the treatment of degenerative diseases. However, the evolution of stimuli-responsive vesicles from bench to bedside still seems far away for the limitations of current stimuli forms such as temperature, light, redox, etc. Since ultrasound combined...

In this paper, robust nonlinear control design to an ionic polymer metal composite (IPMC) with uncertainties and input constraints is studied. The IPMC is a novel smart polymer material, and many potential applications for low mass high displacement actuators in biomedical and robotic systems have been shown. In general, the IPMC has highly nonlinear property, and the control input is subject t...

Our work introduces a class of stimuli-responsive expanding polymer composites with the ability to unidirectionally transform their physical dimensions, elastic modulus, density, and electrical resistance. Carbon nanotubes and core-shell acrylic microspheres were dispersed in polydimethylsiloxane, resulting in composites that exhibit a binary set of material properties. Upon thermal or infrared...

In recent years, nanocomposites based on various nano-scale carbon fillers, such as carbon nanotubes (CNTs), are increasingly being thought of as a realistic alternative to conventional smart materials, largely due to their superior electrical properties. Great interest has been generated in building highly sensitive strain sensors with these new nanocomposites. This article reviews the recent ...