In my continuing study of chemistry at the old school (Rice University) a chief frustration is that, while they can build really cool tiny things, they can’t seem to get anything to scale-up.
Today’s story is about how things can scale-up. (The picture, from Science Daily, is a close-up of a gold nano-structure, with the larger mega-structure it and many "friends" assembled themselves into surrounding it.)
When last we saw Eugene Zubarev, his team was using biological processes to create non-biological nanostructures, specifically gold nanotubes. (That’s the big thing in the middle of the picture.) The same system used to grow your membranes — a water-loving side backed to a water-hating side, with the reverse structure attached like chemical velcro — resulted in tightly-packed cylinders of gold nanoparticles.
Now, with the help of a grad student named Bishnu Khanal, Zubarev has placed the rods into a choroform solution, then evaporated the choloform and water. The result was that the nanorods collected into rings, which were stable even after the solvent and water were gone.
Thousands of rings can be produced at once using this method.
These stable rings don’t have to be made of gold, but may have many
shapes, sizes, and chemical compositions. This means nano-particles can
be easily assembled into useful items such as sensors, or transmitters.
The trip from the laboratory to the factory floor is one of the hardest
tricks Rice science has to make. There are lots of cool things that
nano-structures can do, but unless you have a simple way to make them,
and make them into something, you’ve really just got a parlor trick.
In the last few months Zubarev and his team have shown that we’re no longer talking about parlor tricks. We can now design a particle which does something, mass produce it, and turn those particles into a larger structure which can be manufactured just as silicon chips are manufactured.
Rice nanoscience is finally read to become the nano-business. This can be important in The War Against Oil, because designed structures can either replace energy-hogging systems or even be used to create energy-producing systems.
