Partic. vol. 8 no. 3 pp. 187-187 (June 2010)
doi: 10.1016/j.partic.2010.03.011

Preface

Structure and properties of layered inorganic materials

Xue Duan^*

duanx@mail.buct.edu.cn

Abstract

Inorganic layered materials are a class of advanced functional materials that have attracted considerable attention by virtue of their practical applications in a wide variety of fields. Systematic studies of structure, design, synthesis, and fabrication processing may extend the range of practical utility of inorganic layered functional materials, in areas such as food industry, chemical industry, energy engineering, environmental engineering, drug and gene delivery, electronics technology, and materials protection. This special issue of PARTICUOLOGY is devoted to recent progress in the study of inorganic materials including layered double hydroxides (LDHs), layered metal hydroxide salts, metal coordination polymers, and composite oxides. The nine invited papers contained in this volume were contributed by members of some of the most active teams in this research area and were peer-reviewed. They cover mild hydrothermal and atom-economic reactions for the preparation of inorganic particles, vapour-diffusion assisted growth of oriented thin films, structural aspects studied from both the experimental and theoretical points of view, controllable magnetic and electric properties of particles, and optimization of the washing process for the large-scale preparation of particulate materials. The study of inorganic layered materials has focused on developing novel applications in many fields such as separation and catalytic membranes, imaging and data storage media, light energy harvesting devices, drug and gene delivery, and electrode modifiers. On the other hand, our understanding of the in situ formation of inorganic layered particles (such as LDHs) is very limited. Novel characterization techniques are required in order to obtain morphological and structural information with 3D spatial resolution. The resulting advances in our knowledge of the detailed structure of inorganic layered particles may provide information allowing novel morphologies such as spheres, belts, and fibrous structures to be tailored for specific applications. Greater understanding of these materials may also enable the oriented growth and surface assembly of films of such materials on the surfaces of different substrates to be achieved, resulting in the ability to control film microstructure and particle orientation. We hope that these papers will be of interest to the readers of PARTICUOLOGY working in the areas of nanochemistry, nanobiotechnology, and inorganic functional micro-/nanomaterials.