Introduction

Nature should be the essential inspiration for researchers and engineers that try to develop systems and structures. The main inspirational point is certainly the adaptive behavior that provides the self-regulation ability. Through the history, human technology is always related to different materials and it is possible to recognize ages defined by some material invention: stone and metal, for instance. Recently, smart materials should be identified as the stimulus of a new age. Basically, smart materials have a coupling between mechanical and nonmechanical fields that confers the material a special kind of behavior. In this regard, it is possible to imagine numerous applications due to the coupling of fields that usually are not connected. The smart material age tries to exploit the idea to construct systems and structures with adaptive behavior that have the ability to change properties due to environmental changes and repairing themselves when necessary.