Advanced Materials and Applications

Modern undergraduates and graduate students are keenly interested in the various ways in which chemistry impacts everyday life. This interest stems partly from career imperatives, but also from a natural interest in the relationship between fundamental science and the technology that increasingly dominates our lives. Classical chemistry courses at the university level rightly emphasize fundamental science. But courses that focus on the utilization of that chemistry are still rare. This book is an outgrowth of a course in materials chemistry that I have taught for several years in the Chemistry Department at various Institutions. It is a course taken by advanced undergraduates and by students who are in the first year of the graduate program in chemistry, most of whom have had little or no prior exposure to materials science. The class has also attracted undergraduates from materials science and chemical engineering programs who are seeking a general overview of the field. The subject matter is wide-ranging and, because the course extends over only one semester, the treatment aims for breadth, understanding, and perspective rather than great depth. The athematical foundations of the field are deliberately excluded in order to emphasize chemical concepts rather than the traditional engineering or physics treatments. A challenge with this approach is that published material relevant to this subject is widely scattered in specialist books and research articles, and this presents a problem for students who seek to access background reading material. Thus, I have written this book in order to present a qualitative overview of relevant chemistry-related aspects and to provide a springboard to encourage readers to delve deeper into specific topics. Each chapter ends with a brief summary of future challenges in the different fields that could form the basis of class discussions and brainstorming sessions. A few of the references are to historical, ground-breaking articles t