Гранты для нанотехнологий: UNH builds invisible tools
ANNE RUDERMAN
University scientists hope their research project will put their program on the map.
Fordism, step aside. Manufacturing is about to go nano. A group of scientists at the University of New Hampshire and two other universities recently received a $12.4 million grant to develop nanomanufacturing, or assembly lines scaled down to nanoelements and their one-billionth-of-a-meter size.
With the five-year National Science Foundation grant, the scientists hope to produce a series of tools that can assemble nanoelements into precise patterns and then transfer those patterns onto another surface, like stamps would.
It isn't just pie-in-the-sky research, either. At the end of the five years, the scientists hope to have 12 tools and two full-out products - nanotube memory chips, which are like super silicon chips, and
biosensors that can be implanted in the human body or blood stream for early disease detection.
For UNH, the multi-million dollar grant is also a chance to bring a growing nanoscience department to the forefront of research, with the potential for making the university a major player in the nanotechnology field.
Rather than wheels on a car, or bumpers or fenders, we're talking about products with nanoscale components," said Glen Miller, who is leading the program at UNH. "So we're making things we can't see."
Technically speaking, nanotechnology is a technology that operates with particles that range between 1 and 100 nanometers - or one ten-thousandth of a millimeter at the largest - and that have special properties because of their small size.
Some nanoelements are biological, like proteins or DNA, which is around 2.5 nanometers. Others, like the carbon nanotubes and soccer-ball shaped fullerenes, are carbons. These are the ones that Miller works with. The challenge for all of nanotechnology, as the National Nanotechnology Initiative puts it, is to "fabricate and combine nanoscale building blocks to make useful devices."
Nanotechnology is already in the works in many products, from the computer on your desk to step-assists on vans.
The difference is that right now conventional technologies are used to create most nanotechnoloy-based products - whereas Miller and his group at the Center for High-Rate Nanomanufacturing are trying to rework the process in order to shrink the surfaces necessary for nanoelements and speed up the production.
For example, computer chips are created through a process called lithography, which carves out a pattern on semiconductors. But lithography can only operate on a scale of 1,000 nanometers, meaning only so many transistors can be crammed onto a single computer chip.
What Miller, a 39-year-old organic chemist, is trying to do is flip the process around and create a tool, or template, with a molecular design so the carbon nanotubes will self-assemble into the right shape.
"We can't actually assemble them," he said. "The only way to do it is to get the tubes to line themselves up."
At the end of the project, Miller and scientists at the Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts at Lowell hope to have a dozen templates that will allow them to manufacture nanodevices at high rates and large volumes.
The project, which took three years to develop, has also teamed the universities with 15 companies, ranging from BAE Systems to Motorola and is working to help develop nanotube memory chips for Nantero and biosensors for Triton Systems.
"Just like magnets have a preferred orientation, so do molecules," he said. "The patterns will be predetermined depending on what kind of device we're going to make."
Although some products that use nanotechnology are already on the market, the National Science Foundation estimates that nanotechnology-based products will create 2 million jobs and add $1 trillion in revenue to the world economy by 2015.
The potential for Nantero alone is a $100 billion a year industry, if the company succeeds in making a universal memory chip that could replace current electronic memory chips.
"It would really affect just about every electronic device that you have," said Nantero CEO Greg Schmergel.
"This is a product the semiconductor industry has been trying to make for 20 years. But it hasn't been available in mass quantities, it just hasn't worked yet."
For UNH, the payoff is as much one of making it to the nanotechnological big leagues as any gadgetry.
"We're slowly developing our name as a player in these fields,"Miller said.
But the pressure's on. If they do nothing in five years, the $12 million NSF grant will look like a waste, Miller said. But if they hit it, the university might be looking at something big.
"This is a very, very big grant,"Miller said. "It really raises our image in the field and we have the next five years to raise our reputation."
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