Nano Design For Smart Gels Introduction

From the one of the first definitions of what constitutes a gel from Flory that "a substance is a gel if it has a continuous structure with macroscopic dimensions that is permanent on the time scale of an analytical experiment and is solid like in its rheological behavior" to innovative new nanotechnologies that goes from applications of biocompatible tissue engineering or soft matter optical flexible electronic devices. This chapter gives a brief introduction to gels and an overview of the complete book.