Novel synthesis methods for new materials in solid state chemistry

The most common method used for synthesizing inorganic solids is the so-called ‘ceramic method’ which involves synthesizing at elevated temperatures and leads to thermodynamically stable phases. This method has a serious limitation because many inorganic solids of current interest are rather metastable and consequently their preparation requires low temperature methods. In this article, we have reported some methods of synthesis which also include methods that belong to soft-chemistry routes. The selected examples presented in this paper are: (i) the intercalation and or deintercalation of oxygen in oxides by electrochemical oxidation or reduction in aqueous or nonaqueous solutions, (ii) the use of chemical agents such as NO2 or borohydrides for obtaining oxides with tunneled and lamellar structures, (iii) a multistage synthesis processing for intercalating, in layered oxygenated materials, anionic species and acrylic monomers and polymers, (iv) the supercritical fluid processing for preparing nitrides, carbon-nitrides, lamellar oxides and oxy-(hydroxy-) fluorides, and (v) the mechanical alloying for synthesizing new Mg-based binary intermetallics.