This new book offers practical insights into the latest developments in responsive polymers, i.e., polymers engineered to alter structure and properties in response to environmental inputs. The book features original design, methodological, and application data.

Chemists, biochemists, and electronic engineers will find here important new material to understand and characterize molecular and submolecular assemblies that enable the fabrication of switch-driven polymer systems. Beginning from basic research and moving to single-molecular design, the contributors illuminate switching in self-assembled aggregates of polymer chains. These analyses are extended to the switching/changing of macroscopic properties in bulk and thin films.

The book demonstrates how the properties of responsive polymers such as morphology, wetting behavior, adhesion, roughness, permeability etc., can be modified to create and improve biomedical devices, chemical sensors, microfluidic devices, drug delivery systems, adhesion systems, and self-regulating colloids.

For specialists investigating the potential of molecular and submolecular polymer design, this book is essential.

Sergiy Minko is a professor of materials science and has extensive research contacts in Europe, esp. Germany.