Special Issue: Recent Advances on Nanostructured Functional Materials (2018)

This special issue arose with the idea to honor Prof. Eduardo Ruiz-Hitzky (Figure 1), currently Ad Honorem Research Professor at the Materials Science Institute of Madrid of the CSIC (http://www.icmm.csic.es/phbhmg/?page_id=74), on the occasion of his recent retirement. In his long career Prof. Ruiz-Hitzky has largely contributed to the Physical Chemistry of Materials with emphasis on hybrid, biohybrid, and nanostructured materials, topics in which he has been one of the leading scientists. The call for papers amongst numerous outstanding colleagues around the world as well as former collaborators and other relevant scientists who know Professor Ruiz-Hitzky well has allowed us to procure this Special Issue in The Chemical Record journal gathering around fifty contributions dealing with diverse types of nanostructured functional materials. Prof. Eduardo Ruiz-Hitzky Even though nowadays nanostructured functional materials is a topic very familiar for researchers, some aspects related to the development of such organization and arrangement of their constitutive elements were done in the past specially in relation to the development of organic-inorganic hybrid materials. A field in which Prof. Ruiz-Hitzky has been one of the most active scientists since his initial Ph.D. works on organosilane grafting reactions on the surface of sepiolite fibrous clay mineral. Personal accounts related to advances on sepiolite and other clay-based nanostructured materials included in this issue show how much progress in the understanding of these material has been achieved over the course of the last forty years. For instance the use of clays (e. g., layered and fibrous silicates, halloysite nanotubes, layered double hydroxides) for producing functional materials is of interest not only in fields related to industrial and environmental applications, like as catalysts, selective adsorbents, protection of cultural heritage or engineered barrier systems, but also in fields related to pharmacology and biomedicine. Herein, clay-based nanostructured materials are ever more employed as substrates in drug delivery systems, including in theranostics, vaccine adjuvants, and vectorization of DNA for gene transfection. Methodologies for producing these advanced nanostructured materials are frequently based on bottom-up synthetic approaches, in which the clay nanoparticles are used as building blocks to which specific organic molecules or reactive functionalities, biological entities, and other types of inorganic nanoparticles can be conveniently assembled. Clays were also in the origin of the development of a large family of nanocomposite materials when, at the end of the 1980s, researchers from Toyota Central Research Laboratories in Japan reported the first montmorillonite-nylon systems, in which the delaminated clay nanoparticles were dispersed in the polymeric matrix, resulting in materials with improved mechanical properties. Prof. Ruiz-Hitzky contributed to the field with the development of functional polymer-clay nanocomposites provided of ionic and/or electronic conductivities for applications as components of diverse electrochemical devices. Later on he also introduced for the first time nanocomposites involving biopolymers, which he named “bionanocomposites”, a term that is currently the one favored by the community over “nano-biocomposites” later on used by other authors. In this special issue, there are also various contributions dealing with recent advances in the field of both nanocomposites and bionanocomposites developed for various applications. Prof. Ruiz-Hitzky also largely contributed on the use of sol-gel and other synthetic approaches for the development of organic-inorganic hybrids and other nanostructured materials. This issue also counts with relevant contributions to this field focusing on aspects such as geoinspiration in the production of zeolite related materials, emulsion-templating for production of macrocelullar foams, self-assembling and self-organization methodologies for production of nanoarchitectonics, MOFs, silsesquioxanes and diverse films and monolayer interfaces, as well as dealing with their appliance in selective adsorption, membrane separation processes, or SERS-based applications. Finally, it is worthy to mention the presence of a significant number of contributions reporting on the area of nanostructured materials for energy, sensing, and other technological applications (e. g., electromagnetic shielding, electrocatalysis, spintronics, nanofluidics, …). Those papers address aspects from controlled synthesis of the materials to novel methodologies for producing green energy, such as artificial photosynthesis. We are absolutely indebted to all the contributors, not only for their effort and time preparing the papers for this special issue, but more importantly for their enthusiastic support of the initiative dedicated to Prof. Ruiz-Hitzky. We also hope that the issue is interesting and worthy for the readers of The Chemical Record and that it may contribute to a timely overview of the most recent breakthroughs in related areas of hybrid materials. We further hope that this special issue will continue to stimulate exciting discussions and interdisciplinary collaborations among the international scientific communities. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the patronage of The Chemical Record editorial office and, specially, the great support and cooperation from Dr. Brian P. Johnson, Publisher & Managing Editor of The Chemical Record, for his always kind assistance in the management and organization of this special issue. Pilar Aranda, ICMM-CSIC (Spain) Clément Sanchez, Collège de France, Sorbonne Université, PSL University, CNRS (France) Katsuhiko Ariga, NIMS & University of Tokyo (Japan) Guests Editors