Nanotechnology - Application
The increasing drive to understand and control processes is driving demand for nanotechnologies. Recognising development in this field, attention is focusing on the value of synchrotrons. A synchrotron is an extremely high intensity light source which can be tuned to provide light beams similar to powerful laser beams across the electromagnetic spectrum from Infr-Red to X-Ray. Such a facility has academic and engineering applications, including microfabrication extending to nanotechnology, polymer and surface chemistry, and materials science. (Emerging Industries Occasional Paper 2, Enabling Technologies for Australian Industry - A Pilot Study, November 1999.)
Some of the technical feasibilities of Nanotechnology include:
- Self-assembling consumer goods
- Computers billions of times faster
- Extremely novel inventions (impossible today)
- Safe and affordable space travel
- Medical Nano... virtual end to illness, aging, death
- No more pollution and automatic cleanup of already existing pollution
- Molecular food syntheses... end of famine and starvation
- Access to a superior education for every child on Earth
- Reintroduction of many extinct plants and animals
- Terraforming here and the Solar System
Research programs in chemistry, molecular biology, and scanning probe microscopy are laying the foundations for a technology of molecular machine systems. Focused efforts today are centered in Japan, sponsored by STA and MITI; the US has a strong position in the basic technologies. It's time we paid more attention.
Smart and Super Materials...
Nobel prize recipient for co-discovery of Buckyballs Dr. Richard Smalley of Rice University (http://cnst.rice.edu/reshome.html) is busy in the lab working on the development of tubes of unlimited length. So perhaps we'll soon be able to make a space elevator. The wisdom of having tens of thousands of kilometers of ultra strong carbon whip, all under unimaginable tension dangling overhead is not the point. The point is, we are on the threshold of obtaining an incredible new material... that is an omen of things to come.
Although not molecular nanotechnology in the Drexlerian sense (www.foresight.com), the manufacturing of nanometer (billionth\ of a meter) graphitic tubes will open the eyes and the economies of society and industry to the unprecedented power of nanometer scale technology. This one self assembling molecule will give us a glimpse of a very different future, a future of super performance materials.
These tubes are the self assembling "ropes" and "rods" of the nanometer realm, lending themselves to applications such as pulley belts, transferring power between molecular machines. Shorter, stiff multi-walled tubes might be used for rod logic computers or frames with which to hang components of nanomachines.
Buckytubes are the strongest possible material that can be made with known matter (not considering some theoretical possibilities of carbon nitride). The strength of a Buckytube is predicted to be somewhere between 1.2 and 2 times that of a diamond fiber, or a whopping 100 - 150 times as strong as steel at less than one fourth the weight.
This is a dramatic improvement over carbon fiber, now used in the highest performance composites. A Buckytube epoxy composite should have such a high strength to weight ratio as to defy human experience. Airplanes could be about one fifth their present weight with structural members like wings that seem impossibly thin.
Carbon is the highest of high temperature materials.
