Established in 1960, Advances in Heterocyclic Chemistry is the definitive serial in the area-one of great importance to organic chemists, polymer chemists, and many biological scientists. Written by established authorities in the field, the comprehensive reviews combine descriptive chemistry and mechanistic insight and yield an understanding of how the chemistry drives the properties.
The monograph written by Mihoko Otake combines ideas from chemistry and physics, material science and engineering for the revolutionary development of the so-called gel robots. Electroactive polymers are introduced to build new types of muscular-like actuation for deformable robots. The coverage spans from modelling and design to the development, control and experimental testing. A number of methods are proposed for describing the shapes and motions of such systems. The results are demonstrated for beam-shaped gels curling around an object and starfish-shaped gel robots turning over.
This book has the highest impact factor of all publications ranked by ISI within polymer science. It contains short and concise reports on physics and chemistry of polymers, each written by the world renowned experts. It remains valid and useful after 5 or 10 years. The electronic version is available free of charge for standing order customers at: springer.com/series/12/.
The International Workshop on Liquid Crystalline Polymers (LCPs) held in June 1993 in Italy attracted many of the leading researchers in this area of polymer science. The meeting provided a forum for the exchange of research and ideas on current developments and future research and applications of liquid crystalline polymers. This volume consists of a selection of the best papers presented at the meeting covering synthesis and characterization, liquid crystalline thermosets, rheology, blends and composites containing LCPs and transport properties.
Liquid crystal displays were discovered in the 1960s, and today we continue to enjoy the benefits of that fundamental discovery and its translation into a wide variety of products. Like liquid crystals, polymers are unusual materials, and have similarly enjoyed a great deal of research attention because of their vast applications and uses and complex fundamental properties. The combination of liquid crystal and polymer properties produces a broad array of new effectsspanning from densely crosslinked, rigid polymer networks to weakly crosslinked elastomersthat are not simply manifestations of either native liquid crystals or polymers alone.
