Continuous Journey Toward Polymer Applications.

In 2019, 498 papers were published under the section of "Polymer Applications" in Polymers, which covers a range of interesting topics [...].

In 2019, 498 papers were published under the section of “Polymer Applications” in Polymers, which covers a range of interesting topics. There were also 99 Special Issues that addressed some hot topics.

While 3D printing, as a newly emerged technology, attracts attention from a lot of researchers as a method with which to explore new ways to fabricate polymeric devices with enhanced performance and/or new functions [1,2,3,4,5], sensors and actuators (including wearable/flexible electronic devices) still appear to be the major focus in polymer applications [1,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15]. Polymers with special features/functions, such as stimulus-responsive and shape memory [16,17], self-healing [18,19,20,21,22], and assembly [23,24,25,26,27] are being continuously developed, along with analytical/numerical studies [28,29,30], in order to capture the fundamentals for efficient and/or optimized engineering design. Of course, the above mentioned are only parts of the topics of the published papers in 2019 under this section, which focuses on polymer applications. Continuous efforts are needed to investigate the relationships between polymer structures and their properties [22], to enhance filtration/separation [31,32], and to improve the performance of polymers via the concept of composites/nanocomposites [16,31]. Of course, biomedical engineering is currently a very important application field for polymers [2,33,34].

It is not possible to list all these wonderful papers, which are inspiring and helpful to the community of polymer applications. We appreciate these contributions, and hope that 2020 is another successful year for Polymers and this section.