Maria Richetta, Medaglia PG, Mattoccia A, Varone A and Pizzoferrato R
Fifty-eight years ago Fenman, during an American Physical Society meeting at the California Institute of Technology, anticipated the problem of modifying and governing the world of the infinitely small. He said: “What I want to talk about, is the problem of manipulating and controlling things on a small scale… What I have demonstrated is that there is room—that you can decrease the size of things in a practical way. I now want to show that there is plenty of room. I will not now discuss how we are going to do it, but only what is possible in principle… We are not doing it simply because we haven’t yet gotten around to it.” Useless to say how profound his sensibility for science was. We’ve just begun to walk in this enormous field, toward the assembly of devices atom by atom. What we did till now is still rudimentary. Anyhow we believe that Layered Double Hydroxides could play a role in manufacturing these nanometric equipments. Layered Double Hydroxides (LDHs) are 2D ionic lamellar nano-materials belonging to the group of anionic clays. Their structure consists of positively charged brucite-like layers and intercalated anions. The layered structure, together with the flexibility to intercept different anionic species in variable compositions, both inorganic and organic, has attracted increasing interest. In order to meet specific requirements in very distant fields, considerable efforts were made to tailor the physical/chemical properties of LDHs and to design engineered LDH for several applications, ranging from anticorrosion coatings, flame-retardants, catalysis, to water treatment/purification, and biomedical applications. Furthermore they have been applied in energy harvesting and conversion, thanks to the possibility of substituting the composing metals with transition metals. Within the framework of this contribution, we first briefly review the development of synthesis processes (§1). In Paragraph 2, examples of the LDHs applications are reported. We will than focus on our laboratory experimental activities, showing the growth of the structures either on printed circuit tracks for applications of LDHs as gas sensors and biosensors. One more application is in nanostructured-modified textiles.
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