Journal scope

Frequency: 12 issues per year.

Subject coverage: Technical areas concerned with smart materials, structures and systems.

• Materials science: composites, ceramics, processing science, interface science, sensor/actuator materials, chiral materials, conducting and chiral polymers, electrochromic materials, liquid crystals, molecular-level smart materials, biomaterials.
• Sensing and actuation: electromagnetic, acoustic, chemical and mechanical sensing and actuation, single-measurand sensors, multiplexed multimeasurand distributed sensors and actuators, sensor/actuator signal processing, compatibility of sensors and actuators with conventional and advanced materials, smart sensors for materials and composites processing.
• Optics and electromagnetics: optical fibre technology, active and adaptive optical systems and components, tunable high-dielectric phase shifters, tunable surface control.
• Structures: smart skins for drag and turbulence control, other applications in aerospace/hydrospace structures, civil infrastructures, transportation vehicles, manufacturing equipment, repairability and maintainability.
• Control: structural acoustic control, distributed control, analogue and digital feedback control, real-time implementation, adaptive structure stability, damage implications for structural control.
• Information processing: neural networks, data processing, data visualization and reliability.

Research Papers: Reports of original research work; not normally more than 9000 words (10 journal pages).

Technical Notes (not normally more than 7200 words or 8 journal pages): These are technical communications containing material typically insufficient for publication as a full scientific article but revealing new technical procedures. A Technical Note should be sufficiently detailed and in-depth to further the technical know-how of the community and help the development of novel devices.

Brief Communications (not normally more than 3600 words or 4 journal pages): These are brief, urgent announcements of significant advances or preliminary accounts of new work. The most important criteria for acceptance are novelty, significance, topicality and timeliness. These are to be submitted alongside a short letter of justification explaining why the manuscript requires accelerated consideration.

Topical Reviews: A review article should discuss the current state of research in a selected field, and also include a general overview and an introduction with enough basic information to make the article interesting and informative for non-specialists. These are intended to summarize accepted practice and report on recent progress. They do not have to be fully comprehensive and should be about 12 000-18 000 words long. Such articles are generally commissioned by the Editorial Board.

NB: Allow about 200 words from the maximum word limit of any article type for each figure, graph or table.