Preface

Excerpt

The main goal of this special section of the journal is to provide the materials science community with a comprehensive overview on mechanochemical effects in materials synthesis, structure, and properties. The idea of compiling a collection of papers on the subject, crossed my mind last year, while finishing a short special section on mechanochemistry published in the Journal of Materials Science (Volume 52, Number 20) and attending two different niche events. The first one, the “9th International Conference on Mechanochemistry and Mechanical Alloying” (INCOME2017), was organized by the “International Mechanochemical Association (IMA)” and the Institute of Geotechnics of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and took place in Košice (Slovakia) in September 2017. The second one, the third edition of the symposium “Mechanochemical Synthesis and Reactions in Materials Science,” was organized by Professors Laszlo Takacs (University of Maryland Baltimore County), Jacques Huot (Université du Québec à Trois Rivières), Challapalli Suryanarayana (University of Central Florida) and myself, and it was hosted at the “Materials Science & Technology 2017” Conference (MS&T17), in Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania, USA) in October 2017. Listening to the speakers, I realized how far those days seem, where intensive grinding of powder mixtures was mostly used to reduce particle size and achieve a more intimate mixing of reactants or even, to synthesize metal alloys and intermetallics. The recent availability of more powerful milling devices and appropriate milling tools, as well as the advances gained in understanding the fundamentals of mechanochemical reactions, has opened a whole new world of possibilities and triggered renewed interest in the subject. Mechanical milling has become itself a very important area of research for the direct and “green” synthesis of almost any type of substance, including inorganic, organic and organometallic compounds and composites. Today, as shown in this collection of papers, many research groups worldwide have turned their attention to the science of mechanically induced chemical reactions, attracted mostly by the possibility of obtaining highly defective and metastable (but fairly stable) phases with unique microstructures, which are inaccessible to most solid-state or solution-based processing methodologies; furthermore, additional processing and the relaxation of mechanically induced defects allows obtaining materials with tailored microstructures and distinctive functionalities. Although a “Call for Papers” was emailed to people working in the field only in late November, the response of the mechanochemistry community was overwhelming; the submission window remained open shorter than 4 months because of the publishing time constraints and still, the journal received over one hundred manuscripts, which after the corresponding peer-reviewed process to ensure editorial standards have crystallized in the 43 full-length papers included in this collection. These papers cover many aspects of mechanochemistry, and mechanical activation, including fundamentals and methods, applications, emerging opportunities, and challenges. The comments below reflect an attempt to organize this collection of papers, into some sort of logical sequence. …