The Design of Nanotechnology Products

The extreme smallness of nano-objects and nanodevices implies the need for a great many of them for any practical application, which imposes great design challenges. In particular, it may be necessary to abandon the traditional engineering approach of explicit design of each individual component in a system; instead, evolutionary design principles may need to be adopted. Clearly this is very successful in the living world (e.g., brain design). Since living cells are full of intricate nanostructures and nanodevices, they also serve as a direct inspiration for artificial materials and devices. Furthermore, like their living counterparts, nano-objects and nanodevices moving in liquid media are subjected to viscous rather than inertial forces. Another corollary of smallness is the immense surface:volume ratio compared with macroscopic systems, which means that interfacial physical chemistry becomes of vital importance when formulating nanocomposites. Materials selection is anyway confronted with the problem of a much greater range of potential choices, requiring the deployment of computer simulation and high-throughput synthetic and measurement methods in order to be usefully exploited. Quality control, accustomed to traditional macroscopic approaches, requires a similar kind of rethinking.