Chemomechanical Instabilities in Responsive Materials

The present volume includes most of the material of the invited lectures delivered at the NATO Advanced Study Institute Morphogenesis through the interplay of nonlinear chemical instabilities and elastic active media held from 2th to 14th July 2007 at the Institut d'Etudes Scientifiques de Cargèse (http://www.iesc.univ-corse.fr/), in Corsica (France). This traditional place to organize Summer Schools and Workshops in a well equipped secluded location at the border of the Mediterranean sea has, over many years now, earned an increasing deserved reputation. Non-linear dynamics of non equilibrium systems has worked its way into a great number of fields and plays a key role in the understanding of se- organization and emergence phenomena in domains as diverse as chemical reactors, laser physics, fluid dynamics, electronic devices and biological morphogenesis. In the latter case, the viscoelastic properties of tissues are also known to play a key role. The control and formulation of soft responsive or smart materials has been a fast growing field of material science, specially in the area of po- mer networks, due to their growing applications in bio-science, chemical sensors, intelligent microfluidic devices, . Nature is an important p- vider of active materials whether at the level of tissues or at that of s- cellular structures. As a consequence, the fundamental understanding of the physical mechanisms at play in responsive materials also shines light in the understanding of biological artefacts.

First book essentially devoted to the study and development of time and space pulsations and self-shaping phenomena resulting from synergetic interactions between auto-activated reactions and chemically sensitive soft elastic materials A very good balance between introductory and advanced aspects in both fields making the book suitable for both young and confirmed researchers to enter both fields

Inhalt
From Sustained Oscillations to Stationary Reaction-Diffusion Patterns.- Mechanochemical Instabilities in Active Gels.- An Excursion in Theoretical Non Linear Chemistry: From Oscillations to Turing Patterns.- Chemomechanics: Oscillatory Dynamics in Chemoresponsive Gels.- Structural Approaches on the Toughness in Double Network Hydrogels.- Chemomechanical Dynamics of Responsive Gels.- Autonomous Rhythmic Drug Delivery Systems Based on Chemical and Biochemomechanical Oscillators.- Structure Formation and Nonlinear Dynamics in Polyelectrolyte Responsive Gels.- Nonlinear Chemical Dynamics In Synthetic Polymer Systems.- Internal Stress as a Link Between Macroscale and Mesoscale Mechanics.- On Some Passive and Active Motion in Biology.