Abstract :
Twenty years after the first development of
solvothermal reactions, it appears important through the
last research activities to trace the future trends taking into
account their potentialities and the different economical
constraints. During these last 20 years solvothermal reactions
have been mainly used from preparing micro- or
nanoparticles with different morphologies. Due to the
importance to dispose of new materials for developing
either basic research or industrial applications, such a
presentation will be only focussed on the potentialities of
solvothermal reactions in materials synthesis. Solvothermal
reactions are mainly characterized by different chemical
parameters (nature of the reagents and of the solvent) and
thermodynamical parameters (in particular temperature,
pressure). (a) The selection of the composition of the solvent
opens new research areas for stabilizing materials
belonging to different classes of materials (alloys, oxides,
nitrides, sulphides…). (b) The mild temperature conditions
generally used are able to improve chemical diffusion and
reactivity in order to help the preparation of specific
materials at the frontier between either different classes of
inorganic materials (oxides-nitrides, nitrides-halides…) or
inorganic/organic, inorganic/biologic frameworks. (c) The
high pressure conditions, due to the small conveyed energy
compared to temperature, allow also to stabilize metastable
frontier materials (geo-inspired or bio-inspired materials).
(d) In the future, taking into account, from one side: the
economical and the environmental constraints, and from
the other: the industrial demand of materials characterized
by specific physical, chemical and biological properties,
the potential developments of solvothermal processes will
be analyzed
