Thermodynamics of organic materials, a challenge for the coming decades

Chemists and polymer scientists are making major advances in the design of complex organic materials. Long lists of papers and patents are evidence of their successes in copying nature with engineering plastics, functional polymers, smart organic materials and supramolecular architectures. This paper explores how the science of thermodynamics might support such developments in organic materials. Quite a lot of progress is being made in the area of polymer thermodynamics. The state of the art in this field, reported here, is a good basis for taking up the challenge of commercially producing complex organic molecules. One may hope that thermodynamics scientists will also make major advances in the field of nanomolecules and smart functional materials and will thus be able to contribute to the optimization of the production processes for these complex materials. This will require a move from process thermodynamics to a more product/material-oriented approach.