The technology is poised to upend several industries.
Except for flying cars—so far, anyway—scientific progress is letting us knock big-ticket items off our technology bucket list through nanomanufacturing.
by Megan Ray Nichols | Mar 27, 2019 for Industry Week
We’re already looking at driverless cars powered by artificial intelligence and swarms of internet satellites.
So, what’s next? How about manufacturing airplanes and skyscrapers at the molecular level? It’s called nanomanufacturing, and you can expect to hear a lot more about it as it finds its way into a variety of industries and changes how we think about manufacturing in general.
First, a reference point.
A single human hair measures 100,000 nanometers across. It’d be hard to imagine something smaller that’s still useful—especially in manufacturing. But now, researchers in the nanotechnology field typically spend their time working with materials between 10 and 100 nanometers across.
Why so small? At the risk of sounding reductive, it’s because “stuff” doesn’t always operate as we expect at such a tiny scale. For example, as we rearrange and reduce the complexity of chains of molecules, a given material may become:
- Stronger
- More flexible
- More durable
- Lighter-weight
- Better able to resist temperature extremes
- More resistant to environmental and other types of corrosion
Nanotechnology shows so much promise that, in 2000, the United States formed the National Nanotechnology Initiative to cement America’s place as a global leader in this nascent field.