Smart Polymer Nanocomposites: An Overview

Abstract

Smart polymer nanocomposites have gained a wide range of applications in diverse fields of science and technology as they confer the material's great processability and sensitivity to a wide range of environmental stimuli, including magnetic fields, light, temperature, pH, and electrolyte concentration. Incorporating functional or pristine nanoparticles/nanofillers into polymer matrices significantly modifies the properties of smart polymers, including their shape memory ability, selfhealing ability, pH sensitivity, thermal responsiveness, electro responsiveness, etc. These smart polymer nanocomposites find applicability in a wide range of applications such as sensors and actuators, drug delivery, self-healing structural material, smart textiles, smart electronics, aerospace applications, etc. This chapter seeks to address the importance, synthetic strategies, characterization techniques, and application of smart polymeric nanocomposites, summarizing an overview of the range of these materials.

Keywords: Actuators, Diels-Alder reaction, Graphene, In-situ polymerization, Melt-processing, Nanoparticles, Nnanocomposites, Nanotubes, Pi-Pi interaction, Solution-blending, Self-assembly, Smart polymers, Stimuli-responsive polymers.