Journal of Spectroscopy
Volume 2015 (2015), Article ID 693276, 2 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/693276

Editorial

Spectroscopy Applied to Engineering Materials

Ming-Guo Ma,¹ Wen Zeng,² Shao-Wen Cao,³ Zhong-Chang Wang,⁴ and Jie-Fang Zhu⁵

¹Beijing Key Laboratory of Lignocellulosic Chemistry, College of Materials Science and Technology, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing 100083, China
²College of Materials Science and Engineering, Chongqing University, Chongqing 400040, China
³School of Materials Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798
⁴WPI Research Center, Advanced Institute for Materials Research, Tohoku University, Sendai 980-8577, Japan
⁵Department of Materials Chemistry, Ångström Laboratory, Uppsala University, 75121 Uppsala, Sweden

Received 15 December 2014; Accepted 15 December 2014

Copyright © 2015 Ming-Guo Ma et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

For this special issue, we received 29 papers. Finally, 14 papers were selected for publication and more than 50% of the papers were rejected.

It is well known that engineering materials were always important tools in the technological development mainly due to their physical/chemical and mechanical properties in a wide range of applications such as machinery, vehicles, ships, construction, energy instrumentation, and aerospace. It is necessary to use spectroscopes analysis to study structure in engineering materials.

Within the published papers, various engineering materials were introduced such as lithium secondary batteries, hydrogen sensing materials, polymeric composites, high-TC superconductor, cellulose film, carbon nanomaterial, and chitosan. In particular, most spectroscopes analysis methods were applied for the characterization of engineering materials including fluorescence spectroscopy, atomic force microscopy, diode laser-based photoacoustic spectroscopy, polarized micro-Raman spectroscopy, and Raman imaging.

Z. Xie and W. Guan reported three-dimensional fluorescence and infrared spectroscopy analysis of the leachate dissolved organic matter (DOM) of the Three Gorges in spring, summer, and autumn seasons, respectively. Experimental results indicated that three-dimensional fluorescence spectra of the landfill leachate varied with rubbish stacking time. They also reported that the longer the waste stacking time, the lower the protein in leachate concentration and the higher the fulvic-like acid concentration.

Y.-S. Kim and S.-K. Jeong investigated the electrochemical processes occurring at the surface of a highly ordered pyrolytic graphite electrode by in situ atomic force microscopy (AFM). Their results provided the direct and obvious evidence that solvent cointercalation reaction occurred at the initial stage of the surface film formation.

X. Chen et al. used polarized micro-Raman spectroscopy as a powerful tool to map out the molecular orientation of a uniaxially oriented polypropylene-based composite material. Micro-Raman analysis at the surface region was found to demonstrate the surface orientation relaxation and provide an effective way to correlate the extent of relaxation and process conditions. J. L. González-Solís et al. also explored the chemical structure of TlBa₂Ca₂Cu₃O₉ high-TC superconductor films with Tl-1223 phase to monitor spectral map changes from normal state to superconducting state using the technique of Raman imaging, which provided the spatial distribution of the various molecular species within a sample. They reported that this is the first report of preliminary results evaluating the usefulness of Raman imaging in the determination of transition temperature of TlBa₂Ca₂Cu₃O₉ high-TC superconductor films with Tl-1223 phase.

This issue provided the recent development of advanced spectroscopic characterizations for engineering materials. Our expectation is that more attentions will be paid to the research of engineering materials.

Acknowledgments

The editors would like to take advantage of this opportunity to express their sincere thanks to the authors. They would like to thank them for submitting their best papers to this issue. Then, they also apologize for the long time of the review process. For example, it took 115 days to review E. Zumelzu et al.’s paper. Finally, the lead guest editor expresses his/her sincere gratitude to the editor team as it is not easy for them to assign the article to a reviewer.

 Ming-Guo  Ma
 Wen  Zeng 
 Shao-Wen  Cao 
 Zhong-Chang  Wang 
 Jie-Fang  Zhu 