Responsive Supramolecular Gels

Dear Colleagues,

As one of the typical soft materials, gels have attracted tremendous interest for their tissue-like structure, tunable mechanical performance, excellent biocompatibility, and various additional appealing functions. Specifically, supramolecular gels assembled via non-covalent interactions are specially preferred for their dynamic, switchable, and reversible properties, which are usually triggered by diverse external/internal stimuli, including the thermal-, pH-, solvent-, salt-, photo-, electric-, magnetic- and mechano-stimulus. More importantly, the stimuli-responsive behavior of those gels could be tailored by good design of the skeleton molecules (small molecules or polymers), inter-molecular bonds (hydrogen bonds/ionic bonds/host–guest recognition, and so on) or contained solvent (ionic liquids/water/organic solvent) inside the gels. That is to say, both the type of responsive stimulus and the type of switchable properties or functions can be highly tuned. The characteristics of stimuli-triggered soft–stiff transition, sol–gel transition, color transition, transparency transition, or function switch mean that gels have great potential applications in smart materials with switchable properties, recyclable green materials, and 3D-printed products with customized 3D shapes. Although a great number of contributions have been devoted to supramolecular gels so far, many underlying mechanisms are unidentified. Additionally, many emerging applications require brand-new customized chemical/topological structures and properties.

In this Special Issue, studies of supramolecular gels on the nano-, micro-, and macro-scale are welcomed. Topics of interest include but are not limited to the special chemical design of gels, the structure–property relationship, supramolecular microgel, supramolecular nanocapsules, supramolecular tough gel, and corresponding application studies in the fields of smart actuators, soft robotics, fluorescent materials, smart glass, shape memory, biomedical materials, drug delivery, flexible and wearable electronics, energy generation and storage, and 3D-printing technology.

Dr. Siyu Zheng
Guest Editor

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