Publisher's Synopsis
Smart Materials are ones that can respond to environmental stimuli by exhibiting changes in properties (mechanical or physical), structure, composition or function. Volume is indexed by Thomson Reuters CPCI-S (WoS).The growing interest in their development is driven by emerging applications and by the integration of smart materials into industrial systems for civilian, industrial, medical and military applications. Among them are composite multiferroic materials which exhibit two or more ferroic features such as ferromagnetism/magnetostriction, ferroelectricity/piezoelectricity or ferroelasticity/shape-memory effects due to their unusual responses: including very large magneto-electric susceptibility, giant magnetostriction and energy-coupling coefficients which approach unity. Other systems include shape-memory and magnetic shape-memory alloys, magnetostrictive materials, magnetorheological fluids and polymers.
