NANOTECHNOLOGY

NANOTECHNOLOGY

ABSTRACT

Nanotechnology is about rearranging atoms which ever    way we want

   Nanotechnology is a hybrid science combining engineering and chemistry. Atoms and molecules stick together because they have complementary shapes that lock together, or charges that attract. Just like with magnets, a positively charged atom will stick to a negatively charged atom. As millions of these atoms are pieced together by nanomachines, a specific product will begin to take shape. The goal of nanotechnology is to manipulate atoms individually and place them in a pattern to produce a desired structure. There are three steps to achieving nanotechnology-produced goods:

• Scientists must be able to manipulate individual atoms. This means that they will have to develop a technique to grab single atoms and move them to desired positions. In 1990, IBM researchers showed that it is possible to manipulate single atoms. They positioned 35 xenon atoms on the surface of a nickel crystal, using an atomic force microscopy instrument. These positioned atoms spelled out the letters "IBM."
• The next step will be to develop nanoscopic machines, called assemblers, that can be programmed to manipulate atoms and molecules at will. It would take viable time frame.
• In order to create enough assemblers to build consumer goods, some nanomachines, called replicators, will be programmed to build more assemblers.

Trillions of assemblers and replicators will fill an area smaller than a cubic millimeter, and will still be too small for us to see with  the naked eye. Assemblers and replicators will work together like hands to automatically construct products, and will eventually replace all traditional labor methods. This will vastly decrease manufacturing costs, thereby making consumer goods plentiful, cheaper and stronger

INTRODUCTION

          Nanotechnology is a technology in which new ferric powder is used for higher density hard drives or DNA sensors on a chip .this is the combination of Chemistry and Engineering called “MOLECULAR NANOTECHNOLOGY”.

         Molecular nanotechnology is much different much more useful and dynamic. It is about building whole molecular machine system, designed on computer, using standard well understood laws of Chemistry with something called molecular assembler. We can place individual atoms and molecules precisely on a structure under construction, this opens up a realm of programmable self assembling machinery and fabrication possibility not found in nature or industry.

         MNT’s initial goal, the key to this technology is a device called ‘molecular assembler’ a programmable robot arm driven by software capable of delivering and bonding atoms and molecules with atomic precision, atask nature does using proteins.

      Around the world scientist are modeling familiar looking machine parts with as few atoms as is necessary to physically “stick” the part together.scientists are on the verge of manipulating atoms and molecules with the same precision as biology.fortunatly we do not need to understand or need to intricacy of an immune system.

WHY SHOULD WE develop it ?

Ignoring for the moment that scientists are a curious lot, always pushing the envelope of what can and cannot be done, precision has been mentioned as a benefit of molecular machines and is one of the keys to understanding why we would want to develop this technology.

In this application, precision means that there is a place for every atom and every atom is in its place. Schematics will be detailed, and there will be no unnecessary parts anywhere in the design. We will use machines of precision to create products of equal precision. With this precision, we should be able to recycle all of the waste products produced by the manufacturing processes and put them to good use elsewhere. Manufacturing will also become less expensive as a result.

Technology has never had this kind of precise control; all of our technologies today are bulk technologies. We take a lump of something and add or remove pieces until we're left with whatever object we were trying to create. We assemble our objects from parts, without regard to structure at the molecular level. Precise atomic-level fabrication has previously only been seen in the growth of crystals or in living biological organisms like the ribosome, which assembles all the proteins in living creatures, or DNA, which carries the instructions for creating a living being. If we incorporate similar processes during our development of nanotechnology, we will begin to gain a degree of complexity and control over systems that previously only evolution and nature have had.

Additional benefits arise when we consider the size of devices that we will be able to create. Once we are working on the atomic scale, we can create machines that will go places about which we could once only dream. More information will be packed into smaller and smaller spaces, and we will be able to do much more with much less. Nanotechnology promises unprecedented and efficient control over our environment, but taking advantage of anticipated developments requires forethought and planning. This is a primary aspect of Foresight's mission, and we continue to explore the costs and the benefits of developing nanotechnology.

EFFECTS OF NANOTECHNOLOGY:-

. Nanotechnology is anywhere from five to 15 years in the future, and we won't see dramatic changes in our world right away. But let's take a look at the potential effects of nanotechnology:

The first products made from nanomachines will be stronger fibers. Eventually, we will be able to replicate anything, including diamonds, water and food. Famine could be eradicated by machines that fabricate foods to feed the hungry.

• In the computer industry, the ability to shrink the size of transistors on silicon microprocessors will soon reach its limits. Nanotechnology will be needed to create a new generation of computer components. Molecular computers could contain storage devices capable of storing trillions of bytes of information in a structure the size of a sugar cube.

• Nanotechnology may have its biggest impact on the medical industry. Patients will drink fluids containing nanorobots programmed to attack and reconstruct the molecular structure of cancer cells and viruses to make them harmless. There's even speculation that nanorobots could slow or reverse the aging process, and life expectancy could increase significantly. Nanorobots could also be programmed to perform delicate surgeries -- such nanosurgeons could work at a level a thousand times more precise than the sharpest scalpel. By working on such a small scale, a nanorobot could operate without leaving the scars that conventional surgery does. Additionally, nanorobots could change your physical appearance. They could be programmed to perform cosmetic surgery, rearranging your atoms to change your ears, nose, eye color or any other physical feature you wish to alter.

• Nanotechnology has the potential to have a positive effect on the environment. For instance, airborne nanorobots could be programmed to rebuild the thinning ozone layer. Contaminants could be automatically removed from water sources, and oil spills could be cleaned up instantly. Manufacturing materials using the bottom-up method of nanotechnology also creates less pollution than conventional manufacturing processes. Our dependence on non-renewable resources would diminish with nanotechnology. Many resources could be constructed by nanomachines. Cutting down trees, mining coal or drilling for oil may no longer be necessary. Resources could simply be constructed by nanomachines.

Nanogears no more than a nanometer wide could be used to construct a matter compiler, which could be fed raw material to arrange atoms and build a macro-scale structure.

The promises of nanotechnology sound great, don't they? May be even unbelievable? But researchers say that we will achieve these capabilities within the next century. And if nanotechnology is, in fact, realized, it might be the human race's greatest scientific achievement yet, completely changing every aspect of the way we live.

Scientists have recently gained the ability to observe and manipulate atoms directly, but this is only one small aspect of a growing array of techniques in nanoscale science and technology. The ability to make commercial products may yet be a few decades away. But theoretical and computational models indicate that molecular manufacturing systems are possible — that they do not violate existing physical law. These models also give us a feel for what a molecular manufacturing system might look like. Today, scientists are devising numerous tools and techniques that will be needed to transform nanotechnology from computer models into reality. While most remain in the realm of theory, there appears to be no fundamental barrier to their development

How will nanotechnology improve our lives?

One of the first obvious benefits is the improvement in manufacturing techniques. We are taking familiar manufacturing systems and expanding them to develop precision on the atomic scale. This will give us greater understanding of the building of things, and greater flexibility in the types and quantity of things we may build. We will be able to expand our control of systems from the macro to the micro and beyond, while simultaneously reducing the cost associated with manufacturing products.

Some of the most dramatic changes are expected in the realms of medicine. Scientists envision creating machines that will be able to travel through the circulatory system, cleaning the arteries as they go; sending out troops to track down and destroy cancer cells and tumors; or repairing injured tissue at the site of the wound, even to the point of replacing missing limbs or damaged organs. The extent of medical repair systems is expected to be quite broad, with the cumulative impact being equally large.

Nanotechnology is expected to touch almost every aspect of our lives, right down to the water we drink and the air we breathe. Once we have the ability to capture, position, and change the configuration of a molecule, we should be able to create filtration systems that will scrub the toxins from the air or remove hazardous organisms from the water we drink. We should be able to begin the long process of cleaning up our environment.

Space will also open up to us in new ways. With the current cost of transporting payloads into space being so high (~$20,000/kg), little is being done to take advantage of space. Nanotechnology will help by allowing us to deliver more machines of smaller size and greater functionality into space, paving the way for solar system expansion. Some have suggested that application of medical nanotechnology might even go so far as to allow us to adapt our bodies for survival in space or on other worlds. While this is certainly a long way off, it provides a glimpse of the thorough control that nanotechnology may provide.

Taking all of this into account, it is clear that nanotechnology should improve our lives in any area that would benefit from the development of better, faster, stronger, smaller, and cheaper systems.

  Nanotechnology is likely to change the way almost everything, including medicine, computers and cars, are designed and constructed

Scientists have recently gained the ability to observe and manipulate atoms directly, but this is only one small aspect of a growing array of techniques in nanoscale science and technology. The ability to make commercial products may yet be a few decades away. But theoretical and computational models indicate that molecular manufacturing systems are possible — that they do not violate existing physical law. These models also give us a feel for what a molecular manufacturing system might look like. Today, scientists are devising numerous tools and techniques that will be needed to transform nanotechnology from computer models into reality. While most remain in the realm of theory, there appears to be no fundamental barrier to their development

What will we be able to make?

Nanotechnology should let us make almost every manufactured product faster, lighter, stronger, smarter, safer and cleaner. We can already see many of the possibilities as these few examples illustrate. New products that solve new problems in new ways are more difficult to foresee, yet their impact is likely to be even greater. Could Edison have foreseen the computer, or Newton the communications satellite?

1. Improved transportation

• Today, most airplanes are made from metal despite the fact that diamond has a strength-to-weight ratio over 50 times that of aerospace aluminum. Diamond is expensive, we can't make it in the shapes we want, and it shatters. Nanotechnology will let us inexpensively make shatterproof diamond (with a structure that might resemble diamond fibers) in exactly the shapes we want. This would let us make a Boeing 747 whose unloaded weight was 50 times lighter but just as strong. 

Today, travel in space is very expensive and reserved for an elite few. Nanotechnology will dramatically reduce the costs and increase the capabilities of space ships and space flight. The strength-to-weight ratio and the cost of components are absolutely critical to the performance and economy of space ships: with nanotechnology, both of these parameters will be improved… Beyond inexpensively providing remarkably light and strong materials for space ships, nanotechnology will also provide extremely powerful computers with which to guide both those ships and a wide range of other activities in space

                   

Lighter materials will make air and space travel more economical.

2. Atom computers

              Today, computer chips are made using lithography -- literally, "stone writing." If the computer hardware revolution is to continue at its current pace, in a decade or so we'll have to move beyond lithography to some new post lithographic manufacturing technology. Ultimately, each logic element will be made from just a few atoms. 

• Designs for computer gates with less than 1,000 atoms have already been proposed -- but each atom in such a small device has to be in exactly the right place. To economically build and interconnect trillions upon trillions of such small and precise devices in a complex three dimensional pattern we'll need a manufacturing technology well beyond today's lithography: we'll need nanotechnology. 

With it, we should be able to build mass storage devices that can store more than a hundred billion billion bytes in a volume the size of a sugar cube; RAM that can store mere billion billion bytes in such a volume; and massively parallel computers of the same size that can deliver a billion  instructions per second

Computers of future will use atoms instead of chips.              

3. Military applications

• Today, "smart" weapons are fairly big -- we have the "smart bomb" but not the "smart bullet." In the future, even weapons as small as a single bullet could pack more computer power than the largest supercomputer in existence today, allowing them to perform real time image analysis of their surroundings and communicate with weapons tracking systems to acquire and navigate to targets with greater precision and control. 

We'll also be able to build weapons both inexpensively and much more rapidly, at the same time taking full advantage of the remarkable materials properties of diamond. Rapid and inexpensive manufacture of great quantities of stronger more precise weapons guided by massively increased computational power will alter the way we fight wars. Changes of this magnitude could destabilize existing power structures in unpredictable ways. Military applications of nanotechnology raise a number of concerns that prudence suggests we begin to investigate before, rather than after, we develop this new technology

Weaponry can incorporate computer but is this prudent?  

4. Solar  energy

Nanotechnology will cut costs both of the solar cells and the equipment needed to deploy them, making solar power economical. In this application we need not make new or technically superior solar cells: making inexpensively what we already know how to make expensively would move solar power into the mainstream

Solar energy can replace other resources.                      

5. Medical uses

It is not modern medicine that does the healing, but the cells themselves: we are but onlookers. If we had surgical tools that were molecular both in their size and precision, we could develop a medical technology that for the first time would let us directly heal the injuries at the molecular and cellular level that are the root causes of disease and ill health. With the precision of drugs combined with the intelligent guidance of the surgeon's scalpel, we can expect a quantum leap in our medical capabilities.

Medicines can heal at the molecular or cellular level.      

CONCLUSION:

The single most frequently asked question about nanotechnology is: How long? How long before it will let us make molecular computers? How long before inexpensive solar cells let us use clean solar power instead of oil, coal, and nuclear fuel? How long before we can explore space at a reasonable cost?

The scientifically correct answer is: We don't know

From relays to vacuum tubes to transistors to integrated circuits to Very Large Scale Integrated circuits (VLSI) we have seen steady declines in the size and cost of logic elements and steady increases in their performance.⁷

• Extrapolation of these trends suggests we will have to develop molecular manufacturing in the 2010 to 2020 time frame if we are to keep the computer hardware revolution on schedule. 
• Of course, extrapolating past trends is a philosophically debatable method of technology forecasting. While no fundamental law of nature prevents us from developing nanotechnology on this schedule (or even faster), there is equally no law that says this schedule will not slip. 

Much worse, though, is that such trends imply that there is some ordained schedule -- that nanotechnology will appear regardless of what we do or don't do. Nothing could be further from the truth. How long it takes to develop this technology depends very much on what we do. If we pursue it systematically, it will happen sooner. If we ignore it, or simply hope that someone will stumble over it, it will take much longer. And by using theoretical, computational and experimental approaches together, we can reach the goal more quickly and reliably than by using any single approach alone.  How long will it take? A lot depends on when we start.                  

REFERENCES:

www.zyex.com

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