nanostructures

Nanostructures

Dna nanostructure (32)
Nanocage (12)
Nanocapsule (25)
Nanocomposite (87)
Nanocube (23)
Nanofiber (112)
Nanofibre (6)
Nanoflake (7)
Nanofluid (9)
Nanoframe (10)
Nanohole (10)
Nanolayer (5)
Nanomesh (37)
Nanoneedle (12)
Nanopillar (20)
Nanopore (106)
Nanoribbon (83)
Nanorod (69)
Nanosheet (85)
Nanostructure (323)
Nanotube (863)
Nanowire (491)

Plane designs will make more use of carbon composites and, in the future, carbon nanofibres. Air traffic control and airport management will also be revolutionised as digital technology makes aircraft easier to manage.

#Nanotubes: Can we make speakers as thin as paper? It's time for one of those imagined futures

a thin, transparent film made from microscopic tubes called carbon nanotubes (CNTS), aligned parallel to the plane of the film.

gasgetting CNT films to emit sound is not the same as producing good-quality sound over the whole frequency range of human hearing,

So while the CNT speakers might have valuable applications such as sonar#they work perfectly well underwater#it isn't yet clear

One of the ways in which#to improve sound output is to surround the CNT film with a gas that has a lower heat capacity than air,

All things considered, Barnard and colleagues conclude that a high power CNT loudspeaker is feasible, but it won't be simple.

The CNT films will need probably to be enclosed and immersed in xenon, for example, which would pose serious challenges for making robust"wearable#speakers.

which is basically the same stuff as the walls of carbon nanotubes but flattened into sheets.

So one way or another, these forms of nanocarbon look destined to make our isles full of noises.

#Wearable sensor clears path to long-term EKG EMG monitoring Researchers from North carolina State university have developed a new, wearable sensor that uses silver nanowires to monitor electrophysiological signals, such as electrocardiography

The new nanowire sensor is comparable to the wet sensors in terms of signal quality, but is a"dry"electrode-it doesn't use a gel layer,

because the nanowires are inlaid in the polymer.""The sensors stem from Zhu's earlier work to create highly conductive and elastic conductors made from silver nanowires,

and consist of one layer of nanowires in a stretchable polymer. The new sensor is also more accurate than existing technologies at monitoring electrophysiological signals

when a patient is in motion.""The silver nanowire sensors conform to a patient's skin, creating close contact,

"Zhu says.""And, because the nanowires are so flexible, the sensor maintains that close contact even when the patient moves.

The nanowires are also highly conductive, which is key to the high signal quality.""The new sensors are also compatible with standard EKG

-and EMG-reading devices.""I think these sensors are essentially ready for use, "Zhu says"The raw materials of the sensor are comparable in cost to existing wet sensors,

is a postage-stampized chip with nanowires that are 1, 000 times thinner than a human hair and are coated with antibodies that recognize circulating tumor cells.

the tumor cells stick to the nanowires like Velcro. Capturing the tumor cells was just part of the battle, though.

Polymer brushes on the Nanovelcro nanowires respond to the temperature changes by altering their physical properties allowing them to capture

They can even lay down carbon nanotubes, tiny structures made of linked carbon atoms, and are working to align them to build futuristic circuits, according to Mccarroll.

but they say theye made a breakthrough that could take thermophotovoltaics far beyond where it gone before. mit thermophotovoltaics MIT nanophotonic solar thermophotovoltaic device, with an array of multialled carbon nanotubes as the absorber, a oneimensional silicon/silicon dioxide photonic crystal as the emitter

T) he team inserted a two-layer absorber-emitter device made of novel materials including carbon nanotubes and photonic crystals between the sunlight and the PV cell.

is an array of multiwalled carbon nanotubes, which very efficiently absorbs the light energy and turns it to heat.

so that when it is heated by the attached layer of nanotubes, it lows ith light whose peak intensity is mostly above the bandgap of the adjacent PV,

and software company Cit about the need for modern software tools to design plastics from polymers. he new software tool helps us predict how different production processes affect the nanostructure of the polymers,

and nanotubes By injecting carbon nanotubes into the bloodstream, scientists can use near-infrared lasers to see blood flow in a living animal brain.

or NIR-IIA, involves injecting water-soluble carbon nanotubes into a live mouse bloodstream. The researchers then shine a near-infrared laser over the rodent skull.

The light causes the specially designed nanotubes to fluoresce at wavelengths of 1, 300-1, 400 nanometers;

The fluorescing nanotubes can then be detected to visualize the blood vesselsstructure. Amazingly, the technique allows scientists to view about three millimeters underneath the scalp

Second, injecting carbon nanotubes needs approval for clinical application; the scientists are currently investigating alternative fluorescent agents.

MOLDED IMAGES Previously, it was impossible to make nanopillars through cheap molding processes because the pillars were made from materials that preferred adhering to the mold rather than whatever surface they were supposed to cover.

The usual material for making nanopillars is too brittle to survive handling well. The team demonstrated the nanopillars could stick to plastics, fabric, paper,

and metal, and they anticipate that the arrays will also transfer easily to glass and leather.

#Handheld terahertz cameras could replace MRI Rice university rightoriginal Studyposted by Mike Williams-Rice on June 11 2014scientists have used carbon nanotubes to create compact terahertz sensors that operate at room temperature.

The scientific community has long been interested in the terahertz properties of carbon nanotubes says Franãois LÃNARD a scientist at Sandia National Laboratories.

and his team have investigated terahertz phenomena in carbon nanotubes but those have focused mainly on the use of one or a bundle of nanotubes.

The problem LÃNARD says is that terahertz radiation typically requires an antenna to achieve coupling into a single nanotube due to the relatively large size of terahertz waves.

The researchers however found a way to create a small detector that is visible to the naked eye.

The thin carbon nanotube film developed by Rice chemist Robert Hauge and graduate student Xiaowei He does not require an antenna

Carbon nanotube thin films are extremely good absorbers of electromagnetic light he explains. In the terahertz range the film a mix of metallic

and semiconducting nanotubes soaks up all of the incoming terahertz radiation. rying to do that with a different kind of material would be nearly impossible

But that s what we ve achieved with the carbon nanotubes. The research was reported in the journal Nano Letters.

The chip, festooned with tiny carbon nanotubes (engineered segments of carbon that are efficient electrical conductors) and treated with a proprietary polymer

Star and his team have developed similar chip/nanotube sensors that can be affixed to a toothbrush to detect bad breath (the presence of hydrogen sulfide)

Shapiro team utilized photosynthetic microorganisms that form gas nanostructures called as vesicles which the researchers discovered were excellent imaging agents for ultrasound,

In particular, certain photosynthetic microorganisms regulate their buoyancy by forming protein-shelled gas nanostructures called as vesiclesinside the cell body.

Loss is delivered to one of the microresonators by a tiny device a chromium-coated silica nanotip

#New nanothreads are like diamond necklaces Scientists say super-thin iamond nanothreadsould be stronger and stiffer than the strongest nanotubes

The tricky bit according to Rice university chemist Angel Martã is keeping the densely packed nanotubes apart before they re drawn together into a fiber.

Left to their own devices carbon nanotubes form clumps that are perfectly wrong for turning into the kind of strong conductive fibers needed for projects ranging from nanoscale electronics to macro-scale power grids.

Earlier research at Rice by chemist and chemical engineer Matteo Pasquali a coauthor of the new paper used an acid dissolution process to keep the nanotubes separated until they could be spun into fibers.

and lead authors Chengmin Jiang a graduate student and Avishek Saha a Rice alumnus starts with negatively charging carbon nanotubes by infusing them with potassium a metal and turning them into a kind of salt known as a polyelectrolyte.

otherwise dampen the nanotubes ability to repel one another. Put enough nanotubes into such a solution and they re caught between the repellant forces

and an inability to move in a crowded environment Martã says. They re forced to align a defining property of liquid crystals

and tightly binds the nanotubes together says Martã an assistant professor of chemistry and bioengineering and of materials science and nanoengineering.

But to make macroscopic materials Martã s team needed to pack many more nanotubes into the solution than in previous experiments. s you start increasing the concentration the number of nanotubes in the liquid crystalline phase becomes more abundant than those in the isotropic (disordered) phase

The researchers discovered that 40 milligrams of nanotubes per milliliter gave them a thick gel after mixing at high speed

and filtering out whatever large clumps remained. t s like a centrifuge together with a rotary drummartã says of the mixing gear. t produces unconventional forces in the solution. eeding this dense nanotube gel through a narrow needle-like opening produced

and the team is investigating ways to improve their electrical properties through doping the nanotubes with iodide. he research is basically analogous to

but gave the process a spin with a different preparation so now we re the first to make neat fibers of pure carbon nanotube electrolytes.

because the setup is sealed. he nanotube electrolyte solution could be protected from oxygen and water which would have caused precipitation of the nanotubeshe says. t turns out that this is not a showstopper

because we want the nanotubes to precipitate and stick to each other as soon as they exit the sealed system through the needle.

The color display technology delivers bright red blue and green hues from five-micron-square pixels that each contains several hundred aluminum nanorods.

By varying the length of the nanorods and the spacing between them researchers Stephan Link and Jana Olson showed they could create pixels that produced dozens of colors including rich tones of red green

because it s compatible with microelectronic production methods but until now the tones produced by plasmonic aluminum nanorods have been muted

and washed outsays Link associate professor of chemistry at Rice and the lead researcher on the PNAS study. he key advancement here was to place the nanorods in an ordered array. lson says the array setup allowed her to tune the pixel s color in two

ways first by varying the length of the nanorods and second by adjusting the length of the spaces between nanorods. his arrangement allowed us to narrow the output spectrum to one individual color instead of the typical muted shades that are produced usually by aluminum nanoparticlesshe adds.

Olson s five-micron-square pixels are about 40 times smaller than the pixels used in commercial LCD displays.

To make the pixels she used aluminum nanorods that each measured about 100 nanometers long by 40 nanometers wide.

She used electron-beam deposition to create arrays regular arrangements of nanorods in each pixel.

and the inherent directionality of the nanorods provides another advantage. ecause the nanorods in each array are aligned in the same direction our pixels produce polarized lighthe says. his means we can do away with one polarizer in our setup

By increasing the strength of the pili nanowires she improved their ability to clean up uranium and other toxic wastes.

The Geobacter biofilm encased by a network of nanowires and slime gives the bacteria a shield

As the biofilm concentrates many nanowires around the Geobacter cells more uranium can be mineralized bound

and then use those nanostructures like LEGO to construct larger materials you can obtain nearly any set of properties you want.

what they call three-dimensional nanolattices that are formed by a repeating nanoscale pattern. After the patterning step they coated the polymer scaffold with a ceramic called alumina

and DNA the assembly of nanotechnological components or small organic polymers or the chemical alteration of carbon nanotubes. e need to continue to optimize the system

The metallic nanostructures use surface plasmons waves of electrons that flow like a fluid across metal surfaces.

and nanotubes Stanford university rightoriginal Studyposted by Bjorn Carey-Stanford on August 7 2014by injecting carbon nanotubes into the bloodstream scientists can use near-infrared lasers to see blood flow in a living animal s brain.

or NIR-IIA involves injectingâ water-soluble carbon nanotubes into a live mouse s bloodstream. The researchers then shine a near-infrared laser over the rodent s skull.

The light causes the specially designed nanotubes to fluoresce at wavelengths of 1300-1400 nanometers;

The fluorescing nanotubes can then be detected to visualize the blood vessels structure. Amazingly the technique allows scientists to view about three millimeters underneath the scalp

Second injecting carbon nanotubes needs approval for clinical application; the scientists are currently investigating alternative fluorescent agents.

Previously it was impossible to make nanopillars through cheap molding processes because the pillars were made from materials that preferred adhering to the mold rather than whatever surface they were supposed to cover.

The usual material for making nanopillars is too brittle to survive handling well. The team demonstrated the nanopillars could stick to plastics fabric paper

and metal and they anticipate that the arrays will also transfer easily to glass and leather.

Adding silver nanorods to the graphene film would increase the conductivity to the same as copper,

The Research center for Exotic Nanocarbons in Japan and the Center for Nanoscale Science at Penn State supported the research u

oxidizing it and allowing hydrogen fluoride to burn inverted pyramid-shaped nanopores into the silicon. Fine-tuning the process resulted in a black silicon layer with pores as small as 590 nanometers (billionths of a meter) that let through more than 99 percent of light.

or PDMS, and carbon nanotubes. HOW IT WORKS When the terahertz light hits the transducer, the nanotubes absorb it,

turning it into heat. They pass that heat on to the PDMS. The heated PDMS expands,

Much of Reguera research with these bacteria focuses on engineering their conductive pili or nanowires.

and solar cells but Pint and Westover are confident that the rules that govern the load-bearing character of their design will carry over to other materials such as carbon nanotubes and lightweight porous metals like aluminum.

#DNA motor uses arms to walk across a nanotube Purdue University rightoriginal Studyposted by Emil Venere-Purdue on December 19 2013engineers made a motor out of DNA

and then used it to move nanoparticles of cadmium disulfide along the length of a nanotube.

As it moves along a carbon-nanotube track it continuously harvests energy from strands of RNA molecules vital to a variety of roles in living cells

and viruses. ur motors extract chemical energy from RNA molecules decorated on the nanotubes and use that energy to fuel autonomous walking along the carbon nanotube trackchoi says.

The core is made of an enzyme that cleaves off part of a strand of RNA. After cleavage the upper DNA arm moves forward binding with the next strand of RNA

The process repeats until reaching the end of the nanotube track. The researchers combined two fluorescent imaging systems to document the motor s movement one in the visible spectrum and the other in the near-infrared range.

and the nanotubes are fluorescent in the near-infrared. The motor took about 20 hours to reach the end of the nanotube which was several microns long

but the process might be sped up by changing temperature and ph a measure of acidity.

and medical devices to structural components for the automotive civil and aerospace industries. he cellulose nanocrystals represent a potential green alternative to carbon nanotubes for reinforcing materials such as polymers and concrete.

Zhu was presenting his technique for spraying nanoribbons films and Volman recognized the potential. ristine graphene transmits electricity ballistically

but graphene nanoribbons (GNRS) unzipped from multiwalled carbon nanotubes in a chemical process invented by the Tour group in 2009 do the job nicely he says.

Tour says the availability of nanoribbons is no longer an issue now that they re being produced in industrial quantities. ow we re going to the next levelhe says noting that GNR films made into transparent films might be useful for deicing car windshields a project the lab intends to pursue.

Volman suggests the material would make a compelling competitor to recently touted nanotube-based aerogels for deicing airplanes in the winter. e have the technology;

#Tiny Lego blocks build two-faced nanotubes University of Warwick rightoriginal Studyposted by Anna Blackaby-Warwick on November 14 2013using a process similar to molecular Lego scientists

and can be controlled with a much higher level of accuracy than natural channel proteins. hrough a process of molecular engineeringâ##a bit like molecular Legoâ##we have assembled the nanotubes from two types of building blocksâ##cyclic peptides

and polymers. anus nanotubes are a versatile platform for the design of exciting materials which have a wide range of application from membranesâ##for instance for the purification of waterâ##to therapeutic uses including the development of new drug systems. ource:

to make lithium-sulfur cathodes by synthesizing a nanocomposite consisting of sulfur coated with a common inexpensive conductive polymer called polyaniline and

they used porous silicon a material with a controllable and well-defined nanostructure made by electrochemically etching the surface of a silicon wafer.

This allowed them to create surfaces with optimal nanostructures for supercapacitor electrodes but it left them with a major problem.

With experience in growing carbon nanostructures Pint s group decided to try to coat the porous silicon surface with carbon. e had no idea

which is made typically of tungsten##an abundant material also used in conventional light bulbs. ur thermal emitters have a complex three-dimensional nanostructure that has to withstand temperatures above 1800 F 1000 C to be practicalbraun says n fact the hotter

however the 3-D structure of the emitter was destroyed at temperatures of around 1800 F (1000 C). To address the problem Braun and his Illinois colleagues coated tungsten emitters in a nanolayer of a ceramic material called hafnium

#Nanoribbon material keeps gases captive Rice university rightoriginal Studyposted by Mike Williams-Rice on October 11 2013an enhanced polymer could make vehicles that run on compressed natural gas more practical and even prolong the shelf life of bottled beer

Tour s breakthrough nzippingtechnique for turning multiwalled carbon nanotubes into GNRS first revealed in Nature in 2009 has been licensed for industrial production. hese are being produced in bulk

#Does this carbon nanotube computer spell the end for silicon? Stanford university rightoriginal Studyposted by Tom Abate-Stanford on September 27 2013engineers have built a basic computer using carbon nanotubes a success that points to a potentially faster more efficient alternative to silicon chips.

The achievement is reported in an article on the cover of the journal Nature. eople have been talking about a new era of carbon nanotube electronics moving beyond siliconsays Subhasish Mitra an electrical engineer

and computer scientist at Stanford university who co-led the work. ut there have been few demonstrations of complete digital systems using this exciting technology.

Here is the proof. xperts say the achievement will galvanize efforts to find successors to silicon chips which could soon encounter physical limits that might prevent them from delivering smaller faster cheaper electronic devices. arbon nanotubes CNTS have long been considered as a potential successor to the silicon transistorsays Professor

But until now it hasn t been clear that CNTS a semiconductor material could fulfill those expectations. here is no question that this will get the attention of researchers in the semiconductor community

Mihail Roco a senior advisor for nanotechnology at the National Science Foundation called the work n important scientific breakthrough. t was roughly 15 years ago that carbon nanotubes were fashioned first into transistors the on-off switches

But a bedeviling array of imperfections in these carbon nanotubes has frustrated long efforts to build complex circuits using CNTS.

team has made to this worldwide effort. irst they put in place a process for fabricating CNT-based circuitsde Micheli says. econd they built a simple

but effective circuit that shows that computation is doable using CNTS. s Mitra says: t s not just about the CNT COMPUTER.

It s about a change in directions that shows you can build something real using nanotechnologies that move beyond silicon

He called the Stanford work major benchmarkin moving CNTS toward practical use. CNTS are long chains of carbon atoms that are extremely efficient at conducting and controlling electricity.

They are so thinâ##thousands of CNTS could fit side by side in a human hairâ##that it takes very little energy to switch them off according to Wong a co-author of the paper. hink of it as stepping on a garden hosewong explains. he thinner the hose the easier it is to shut off the flow. n theory this combination

of efficient conductivity and low-power switching make carbon nanotubes excellent candidates to serve as electronic transistors. NTS could take us at least an order of magnitude in performance beyond where you can project silicon could take uswong said.

But inherent imperfections have stood in the way of putting this promising material to practical use.

First CNTS do not necessarily grow in neat parallel lines as chipmakers would like. Over time researchers have devised tricks to grow 99.5 percent of CNTS in straight lines.

But with billions of nanotubes on a chip even a tiny degree of misaligned tubes could cause errors

so that problem remained. A second type of imperfection has stymied also CNT technology. Depending on how the CNTS grow a fraction of these carbon nanotubes can end up behaving like metallic wires that always conduct electricity instead of acting like semiconductors that can be switched off.

Since mass production is the eventual goal researchers had to find ways to deal with misaligned

and/or metallic CNTS without having to hunt for them like needles in a haystack. e needed a way to design circuits without having to look for imperfections

or even know where they weremitra says. The Stanford paper describes a two-pronged approach that the authors call an mperfection-immune design. o eliminate the wire-like

or metallic nanotubes the Stanford team switched off all the good CNTS. Then they pumped the semiconductor circuit full of electricity.

All of that electricity concentrated in the metallic nanotubes which grew so hot that they burned up

This sophisticated technique eliminated the metallic CNTS in the circuit. Bypassing the misaligned nanotubes required even greater subtlety.

The Stanford researchers created a powerful algorithm that maps out a circuit layout that is guaranteed to work no matter

whether or where CNTS might be askew. his imperfections-immune design technique makes this discovery truly exemplarysays Sankar Basu a program director at the National Science Foundation.

Their CNT COMPUTER performed tasks such as counting and number sorting. It runs a basic operating system that allows it to swap between these processes.

In a demonstration of its potential the researchers also showed that the CNT COMPUTER could run MIPS a commercial instruction set developed in the early 1980s by then Stanford engineering professor and now university President John Hennessy.

Though it could take years to mature the Stanford approach points toward the possibility of industrial-scale production of carbon nanotube semiconductors according to Naresh Shanbhag a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

and director of SONIC a consortium of next-generation chip design research. he Wong/Mitra paper demonstrates the promise of CNTS in designing complex computing systemsshanbhag says adding that this will motivate researchers elsewhere toward greater efforts in chip design

beyond silicon. hese are initial necessary steps in taking carbon nanotubes from the chemistry lab to a real environmentsays Supratik Guha director of physical sciences for IBM s Thomas J. Watson Research center

and a world leader in CNT research. The National Science Foundation SONIC the Stanford Graduate Fellowship and the Hertz Foundation Fellowship funded the work.

Using a scanning electron microscope the Stanford team captured images of these microbes attaching milky tendrils to the carbon filaments. ou can see that the microbes make nanowires to dump off their excess electronscriddle says.

#Ink-jet printing creates soft nanostructures A new way to make nanostructures combines advanced ink-jet printing technology with block copolymers that spontaneously form ultra-fine structures.

The ability to fabricate nanostructures out of polymers DNA proteins and other oftmaterials has the potential to enable new classes of electronics diagnostic devices and chemical sensors.

And because e-jet can naturally handle fluid inks it is suited exceptionally well for patterning solution suspensions of nanotubes nanocrystals nanowires

and removed the polymer core leaving a ceramic nanolattice. The lattice is constructed of hollow struts with walls no thicker than 75 nanometers. e are now able to design exactly the structure that we want to replicate

Neumann created a version of nanoshells that converts a broad spectrum of sunlightncluding both visible and invisible bandwidthsirectly into heat.

Rice university chemist James Tour and colleagues, who developed a method for unzipping nanotubes into graphene nanoribbons (GNRS),

Tour says. raphene nanoribbons make a terrific framework that keeps the tin oxide nanoparticles dispersed and keeps them from fragmenting during cycling,

since graphene (and its cousin material, carbon nanotubes) is the only material with the high strength-to-weight ratio required for this kind of hypothetical application.

each sensor utilizes an array of tens of thousands of carbon nanotubes, which have had copper atoms attached to them.

While electrons ordinarily flow freely through the nanotubes, any ethylene molecules present in the vicinity will bond with the copper atoms,

which absorb ethylene and concentrate it near the nanotubes. By measuring how much the electron flow has been slowed,