SMART MATERIALS: AN INTRODUCTION

Humans have used smart materials – materials that respond to input with a well-defined output – for thousands of years. The footprint on a soft trail in a jungle can tell a welltrained human (and almost all wild animals) what kind of animal recently passed and even how much it weighed. In this case the soft mud acts as a smart material – responding to and storing information about a passing animal. A reader of Sherlock Holmes is undoubtedly familiar with all kinds of information stored in intelligent materials that the clever detective was able to exploit. Over the last couple of decades the role of smart materials in our lives has become so widespread that (at least, in the industrial countries) most of us would be lost without these materials guiding us.

Let us follow Mr. XYZ (of course, it could also be a Ms. XYZ), a super salesman for a medical supplies company, as he gets up one morning and goes about his business. He checks his schedule on his laptop (semiconductor-based devices process the information, liquid crystals help display the information, ferromagnetic- and polymer-based materials store the information, a laser using semiconductors reads the information …). Mr. XYZ sees that he has to catch a flight in an hour to make a presentation. As he drives to the airport he sees on his car map that there is an accident on his normal route. The car computer hooked up to a satellite system gives him an alternate route, which gets him to the airport on time.