Walking through Soft Materials to Join Supramolecular Gels: An Overview about the Properties and Applications

The class of soft materials includes a large variety of species arising from self-assembly processes and held by non-covalent interactions. This confers peculiar features, allowing applications in very different fields.1 Among soft materials, supramolecular gel phases have aroused a surge of interest.2 These materials combine properties of liquid phase with the ones of a semi-solid network and the large number of gelator/solvent combinations can offer answer to issues of different nature.3 This lecture will show on overview about the obtainment and characterization of gel phases, in the attempt to understand the relationship working between gelator and solvent nature and gel phase properties. With the above information in hand, some of the most interesting applications, so far reported in literature, will be analyzed.