Journal of Materials Chemistry Blog

We are honoured to introduce a special cross-journal collection of Journal of Materials Chemistry C and Sustainable Energy & Fuels in memoriam of Prof. Alasdair James Campbell.

Alasdair, or ‘Al’ as he was known to his colleagues, students and friends, was an exceptional scientist who made considerable impact in the fundamental research of state-of-the-art display technologies, printed photodetectors and transistors, neuromorphic computing and organic biomedical sensors. His work influenced the fields of materials chemistry, bioelectronics and materials science by providing the mechanistic understanding and methods to exploit underlying solid-state physics phenomena.

Guest Edited by Natalie Stingelin and Garry Rumbles, it is a great honour to highlight contributions from a number of Al’s friends, students and colleagues that were at the core of Al’s scientific activity, covering the fields where he had such impact: organic electronics (OLEDs, OFETs and photodetectors), charge transport in organic semiconductors, chiral optoelectronic materials, neuromorphic computing, and biomedical sensors based on organic materials, to celebrate Al’s life and science. His friends, students and colleagues will forever remember Al’s science, his kindness and his humour.

We hope you enjoy reading this collection of papers in Journal of Materials Chemistry C and Sustainable Energy & Fuels in honour of Prof. Al Campbell. All of the articles in the collection are free to access until 20 July 2022.

Journal of Materials Chemistry C is delighted to announce a call for papers for its latest themed collection on “Stability of Optoelectronic Materials and Devices” Guest Edited by: Yana Vaynzof (Technical University of Dresden), Zhuoying Chen (ESPCI Paris/CNRS/Sorbonne Université/Université PSL) and Dinesh Kabra (Indian Institute of Technology Bombay).

Emerging optoelectronic materials are under intense scrutiny both in terms of their fundamental properties and application in a range of electronic devices. These include, among others, organic materials, quantum dots, metal halide perovskites, metal oxides, 2D materials. These materials have already found application in solar cells, light-emitting diodes, field-effect transistors, photodetectors, lasers and many more. While the function and performance of these devices are highly important, their stability also needs to be addressed if these technologies are to find their way to industrial applications. In this themed collection, we focus on the latest insights regarding the fundamental mechanisms of material degradation, the study of active-material/device stability and the development of mitigation strategies both in terms of chemical design and device architecture engineering.

This call for papers is open for the following article types:

• Communications
• Full papers

Submission Deadline: 30th September 2022

If you would like to contribute to this themed collection, you can submit your article directly through the journal’s online submission service at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jmchemc. Please add a “note to the editor” in the submission form when uploading your files to say that this is a contribution to the themed collection. The Editorial Office reserves the right to check suitability of submissions in relation to the scope of the collection, and inclusion of accepted articles in the final themed collection is not guaranteed.

Guest Editors: Chris Pickard (University of Cambridge, UK), Jörg Behler (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany), and Krishna Rajan (University at Buffalo, USA)

In this themed collection, we invite contributions in materials informatics. Manuscripts are encouraged in topics ranging from novel computational and experimental methods to state-of-the-art applications.

The discipline of Materials Informatics has emerged from a fusion of increasing availability of materials data, high throughput experimental and computational methods, first principles and other advanced materials models, and machine learning. It has been fuelled by the dramatic growth in available computational power, and its ubiquity.

If you are interested in contributing to this collection please get in touch with the Editorial Office by email.

Please add a “note to the editor” in the submission form when you submit your manuscript to say that this is a submission for the themed collection. The Editorial Office and Guest Editors reserve the right to check suitability of submissions in relation to the scope of the collection and inclusion of accepted articles in the collection is not guaranteed. All manuscripts will be subject to the journal’s usual peer review process. Accepted manuscripts will be added to the online collection as soon as they are online, and they will be published in a regular issue of Materials Advances.

In this themed collection, we will collect primary research and review articles from across the area of biomass materials. Manuscripts are encouraged from a broad range of topics related to biomass materials including synthesis/processing, biological-synthetic interfaces, characterization, properties, degradation and end-of-life, lifecycle/economic analysis, and application studies.

Biomass was used by humans to formulate some of the earliest polymers, and contemporary environmental concerns have served as the impetus for the researchers and industry to return to biomass as precursors for engineered materials. Biomass materials are now poised to re-emerge as materials of construction across a range of applications that currently employ synthetic plastics and materials. In adapting biological compounds and materials for use in synthetic systems, the desired biological compound or material of interest is almost always found in extremely complex mixtures of structurally- and functionally-diverse molecules and macromolecules which are impossible to separate. Furthermore, completely removing all water from many biological compounds and materials causes them to lose the desired structure, property, or function of interest. To address these challenges and facilitate this shift in materials usage, interdisciplinary research spanning fundamental understanding of synthesis and properties to translational studies for targeted applications is needed.

If you are interested in contributing to this collection please get in touch with the Editorial Office by email.

Please add a “note to the editor” in the submission form when you submit your manuscript to say that this is a submission for the themed collection. The Editorial Office and Guest Editors reserve the right to check suitability of submissions in relation to the scope of the collection and inclusion of accepted articles in the collection is not guaranteed. All manuscripts will be subject to the journal’s usual peer review process. Accepted manuscripts will be added to the online collection as soon as they are online, and they will be published in a regular issue of Materials Advances.

We invite you to read a new themed collection in Materials Advances on chiral nanomaterials.

We are pleased to inform you that this new themed issue has now been published online.

Read the collection

Guest Edited by Nicholas A. Kotov (University of Michigan, USA), Luis M. Liz-Marzán (CIC biomaGUNE, Spain), and Qiangbin Wang (SINANO, China).

Chiral nanostructures is one of the most rapidly developing research fields encompassing chemistry, physics, and biology. The rise to academic prominence of chiral nanostructures was fuelled by their giant optical activity and the fundamental structural parallels between biotic and abiotic structures with mirror asymmetry. This themed collection provides a snapshot of concepts being developed by a diverse spectrum of scientists around the world working in chiral nanostructures from metals, semiconductors and ceramics. Many fundamental discoveries in this area are expected that are likely to encompass multiscale chirality transfer, chiral surfaces, biological signalling, and circularly polarized emitters. Technological applications being pursued along the way of fundamental studies include biosensing, healthcare, chiral photonics, and sustainable catalysis.

Articles in the collection are published in Materials Advances and they are all freely accessible with open access. A small selection of articles from the collection are provided below.

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We are delighted to share with you a new collection of articles highlighting some of the most popular recent articles published in Materials Advances on energy materials. Containing both reviews and original research, the collection includes work on batteries, device fabrication, supercapacitors, and more.

Read the collection here

Below is a snapshot of some of the papers in the collection. We hope you enjoy reading these gold open access articles.

Review

Direct ink writing of energy materials, Tagliaferri, A. Panagiotopoulos and C. Mattevi, Mater. Adv., 2021, 2, 540-563 DOI: 10.1039/D0MA00753F

Communication

Realizing poly(ethylene oxide) as a polymer for solid electrolytes in high voltage lithium batteries via simple modification of the cell setup, Lukas Stolz, Gerrit Homann, Martin Winter and Johannes Kasnatscheew, Mater. Adv., 2021, 2, 3251-3256 DOI: 10.1039/D1MA00009H

Paper

Influence of La³⁺ induced defects on MnO₂–carbon nanotube hybrid electrodes for supercapacitors, Nilanjan Chakrabarty, Monalisa Char, Satheesh Krishnamurthy and Amit K. Chakraborty, Mater. Adv., 2021, 2, 366-375 DOI: 10.1039/D0MA00696C

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We are pleased to introduce a themed issue in honour of Prof. Daoben Zhu, on the occasion of his 80^th Birthday. This special issue of Journal of Materials Chemistry C is a tribute to one of the pioneers of organic solids in China.

As one of the pioneers of modern organic materials, Professor Zhu’s creativity as well as his contribution to organic solids has inspired many young scientists and has also had a significant effect on global research. His achievements have received prestigious international recognition including the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Chinese Chemical Society (2021), Outstanding Science and Technology Achievement Prize of Chinese Academy of Sciences (2018), Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (1997) and Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2001).

Guest Edited by Qichun Zhang, Wenping Hu, Thuc-Quyen Nguyen, Qibing Pei and Jia Zhu, it is a great honour to highlight contributions from a number of Prof Zhu’s former students, co-workers and friends which cover the design and preparation of new organic conjugated materials, the study of structure–property relationships and their potential applications in important devices including photovoltaics, organic spintronics, organic magnetics, organic thermoelectrics, organic memristors, organic transistors, organic optics, organic batteries, sensors, and bio-applications.

We hope you enjoy reading this Journal of Materials Chemistry C special issue in honour of Prof. Daoben Zhu. A selection of papers are included below or you can access the full issue here.

Editorial

Professor Daoben Zhu: a giant in organic solids in China 
Qichun Zhang, Wenping Hu, Thuc-Quyen Nguyen, Qibing Pei and Jia Zhu
J. Mater. Chem. C, 2022, DOI: 10.1039/D2TC90014A

Reviews

The effect of side chain engineering on conjugated polymers in organic electrochemical transistors for bioelectronic applications
Yifei He, Nadzeya A. Kukhta, Adam Marks and Christine K. Luscombe
J. Mater. Chem. C, 2022, DOI: 10.1039/D1TC05229B

Recent progress in open-shell organic conjugated materials and their aggregated states
Shaoqiang Dong and Zhen Li
J. Mater. Chem. C, 2022, DOI: 10.1039/D1TC04598A

Communication

Cocrystal engineering for constructing two-photon absorption materials by controllable intermolecular interactions
Yihan Zhang,Hongnan Wu, Yuan Wang, Lingjie Sun, Shuyu Li, Yiwen Ren,  Yajing Sun, Fangxu Yang,  Xiaotao Zhang and Wenping Huac
J. Mater. Chem. C, 2022, DOI: 10.1039/D1TC04257B

Papers

Organic–inorganic hybrid metallic conductors based on bis(ethylenedithio)tetrathiafulvalene cations and antiferromagnetic oxalate-bridged copper(ii) dinuclear anions
Bin Zhang, Yan Zhang, Zheming Wang, Dongwei Wang, Deliang Yang, Zengqiang Gao, Guangcai Chang, Yanjun Guo, Takehiko Mori,  Zhijuan Zhao, Fen Liu, Qiaolian Lie and Daoben Zhu
J. Mater. Chem. C, 2022, DOI: 10.1039/D1TC04305F

Photopatternable solid electrolyte for integrable organic electrochemical transistors: operation and hysteresis
Anton Weissbach, Lukas M. Bongartz, Matteo Cucchi, Hsin Tseng, Karl Leo and Hans Kleeman
J. Mater. Chem. C, 2022, DOI: 10.1039/D1TC04230K