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September 16, 2009: It has been generally understood that "nanotechnology" finds a home among a wide range of industries and applications. Now, Georgia Tech researchers have mapped out what that universe looks like and how nanotech work is interrelated.

In a paper published in the September issue of Nature Nanotechnology, researchers Alan Porter and Jan Youtie set out to show that nanotech research is hardly a "a collection of isolated ‘stove pipes’ drawing knowledge from one narrow discipline, but rather is quite interdisciplinary," Porter notes. In fact, "research in any one category of nanoscience and nanotechnology tends to cite research in many other categories."

Their study, analyzing abstracts of >30,000 "nano"-themed papers published in >6000 journals during a six-month period (Jan-July 2008), identifies a strong affinity for materials science, physics (applied and condensed matter), and chemistry (physical and multidisciplinary, but also contributions from fields including clinical/biomedicine and physics, and one deemed "nanoscience and nanotechnology." More than one million references were cited in all, averaging (mean) 33 per paper.

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The position of nanoscience and nanotechnology over a base map of science. Each node is one of 175 subject categories in the SCI database, and the size of the node is proportional to the number of nanopapers published. (Source: Georgia Tech)

Applying text mining, they found 45 subject categories cited by ≥5% of nanopapers, and 98 categories cited by at least 1%. Of the 3863 "nanopapers" in the "nanoscience and nanotechnology" category, 86% cited papers in materials science; another 80 subject categories had 40 or more cited papers each. More than 800 nanopapers in electrical engineering cited papers in journals from 138 different subject categories, while 435 nanopapers in organic chemistry cited papers in journals from 140 different subject categories, they found. They further calculated an "integration score" to gauge the interdisciplinary nature of a particular paper or set of papers — zero for standalone disciplines, to a score of one for highly integrated, heavily-cross-citing disciplines. Not surprisingly, Nanoscience/Nanotechnology rated high (0.65), better than electrical engineering (0.60) and organic chemistry (0.64).

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The fields of science cited by nanotechnology papers. (Source: Georgia Tech)

"Our results show the multidisciplinary nature of research in nanoscience and nanotechnology," though it also shows such interdisciplinary knowledge-sharing happens in a lot of other areas, Porter said. It also shows that nanotech research is concentrated into "macrodisciplines" e.g., materials science and chemistry, with references to similar fields.

"There is a broad perspective that most scientific breakthroughs occur at the interstices among more established fields," and nanotech is believed to be just such a convergence area, added Youtie. "If nanotechnology does have a strong multidisciplinary character, attention to communication across disciplines will be an important feature in its emergence."

Future examination of this topic will explore how R&D patterns can forecast commercialization; societal implications of nanoscience/nanotechnology to preemptively mitigate negative efforts; suggest corporate strategies for nanoscience/nanotech efforts; and identify regional "nanodistrict" hotspots of nanoscience R&D with clustered research and commercial efforts.

by Debra Vogler, senior technical editor, Solid State Technology

September 15, 2009 –  Oxford Instruments Plasma Technology recently launched the Nanofab800 Agile system that provides development opportunities to influence the growth of nanostructures. With a process temperature up to 800°C, and agile heating and cooling for rapid turnaround, the system also delivers control of alignment and dimensions of the nanostructures.

Additional product features include variable sample sizes up to a maximum of 200mm wafers, temperature uniformity better than ±1.5%, and agile temperature control. According to Cigang Xu, development scientist at Oxford Instruments Plasma Technology, the rate of temperature increase for the new system can be up to 130°C/min and the cooling rate is up to 40°C/minute. "These rates are faster than typical values for PECVD tools, and allow the system to have rapid turnaround," said Xu.

The system is able to process at pressures up to 5Torr with a flow rate >1sl/m (standard liter/minute). "High pressure may allow the decrease of the process temperature," noted Xu. "For example, the Si nanowire can be grown at lower temperature when the pressure is higher." A high flow rate capacity also enables flexible choice on the process conditions.

The system is configured with a vacuum load lock to ensure process repeatability and chamber cleanliness and it has an optional liquid source delivery system. There is also a custom-developed setup for aligned growth and control of film stress. — D.V.

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Dense CNTs grown by the Nanofab800 Agile system. (Source: Oxford Instruments Plasma Technology)

September 15, 2009:  Energy harvesting is popularly defined as converting ambient power to electricity to make small devices self-sufficient, often for decades, possibly even hundreds of years. It is certainly not renewable energy on the heroic scale of replacing power stations with grid electricity from the power of the wind, waves, etc. However, there is a middle ground of making things such as trucks and railway stations more energy efficient. For example, regenerative braking and harvesting electricity from shock absorbers and exhaust heat in vehicles makes them more energy efficient. The trans-Australia race involves cars that receive all their motive power from photovoltaics. Japan is already harvesting energy from travellers walking over flexing paving at ticket barriers; this electricity being used to power displays.

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Energy harvesting for small devices, renewable energy replacing power stations, and what comes between. (Source: IDTechEx report, "Energy harvesting and storage 2009-2019")

For both the core energy harvesting business and the harvesting within bigger things, the question arises as to what types of energy harvester will attract the big money, creating billion-dollar businesses. Academia is not necessarily driven by commercial potential, so the huge leap in work on piezoelectrics and photovoltaics may or may not be an indication that these types of energy harvesting will come out on top. Other candidates include thermovoltaics (exploiting heat differences) and electrodynamics. There are also dozens of other curiosities such as use of magnetostriction, electrostatic capacitive devices including electroactive polymers, electrets, and so on — doing it all with microelectromechanical systems (MEMS).

Wide variety of applications

All these energy-harvesting efforts are being applied to an impressive variety of applications. Piezoelectrics serve in the gas lighter and the light switch that have no wiring or battery. Photovoltaics appears in calculators, street furniture, satellites, and much more — and now we have transparent photovoltaics in the form of flexible films, converting ultraviolet, infrared, and visible light and other versions tolerant of narrow angles of incidence and low levels of light. All this will hugely widen the number of possible applications.

Electrodynamics has moved from the bicycle dynamo to vibration harvesting, electricity from flexing floors and pavements, micro wind turbines and even powering the implanted heart defibrillator or pacemaker from the heart itself — no need to cut you open to change your battery anymore. Universities should do much more to support this work.

Thermovoltaics is being tested in implants and on car exhaust pipes, not just in engines. Ultralow-cost laptops for the third world employ both photovoltaics and electrodynamics where one project finds that a ripcord is preferred to a crank.

Some energy-harvesting options lean toward the strange. The US military is testing it for robot jellyfish and robot bats for surveillance. So-called wireless sensor nodes are being developed, dropped from helicopters and self-organizing in a self-healing wireless mesh network; applications include monitoring forest fires and other natural disasters as well as pollution outages over vast, inaccessible terrain. Energy harvesting will do away with the need for batteries here.

Counting the dollars

IDTechEx has analyzed a large number of energy-harvesting activities, producing 10-year forecasts for everything from self-sufficient wristwatches to mobile phones that will never need a charger to light switches and controls that have no wiring and no batteries when fitted in buildings. We find that the total market in 2019 will exceed $4 billion (segmented roughly below) — even the niche opportunities are significant.

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Estimated value share of technologies in the global energy harvesting market in 2019. (Source: IDTechEx report, "Energy harvesting and storage 2009-2019")

We see a clear route to billion-dollar businesses in photovoltaic and electrodynamic energy harvesting — even ignoring energy storage and associated electronics. The impressive effort on piezoelectric energy harvesting in universities and research centers (such as Germany’s Fraunhofer Institutes) may yet come up with something bigger than that portrayed above. However, as yet, we find it difficult to envisage piezoelectrics powering many consumer items such as wristwatches, mobile phones, laptops, e-books, and others.

The key to wireless sensor networks

While it is generally accepted that 70%-90% of envisaged uses of wireless sensor networks cannot succeed without some form of energy harvesting, replacing short-lived primary batteries in the nodes, it is far from clear that piezoelectrics will be the favored solution here. In military, aerospace, and other industrial and healthcare applications, piezoelectrics has a place, such as harvesting vibration; the piezoelectric light switch and piezo actuators in general have a great future. However, we have difficulty in seeing a large income arising from the harvesting module itself, as is clear with the photovoltaic and electrodynamic applications. Indeed, with these two technologies there are already large commercial successes in 2009.

The greater market

Within the term "energy harvesting" some include extra markets such as ambient power conversion in vehicles and railway stations. In vehicles, it will be thermovoltaics that harnesses exhaust heat. Electrodynamics will harness power from shock absorbers (recently announced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and regenerative braking is already a reality. Moving flooring and pavements generate power from people walking over them, achieved electrodynamically or by piezo power — and the same is true of vibration harvesting in bridges, roads, and aircraft.

Raghu Das is CEO of IDTechEx in Cambridge, UK, and event director of the IDTechEx conference Energy Harvesting and Storage USA, Nov. 3-4 in Denver, CO.

September 11, 2009:  Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) say they have a new method to improve temperature calibration for microfluidic systems.

Typically, reactions in microfluidic systems require some form of heating, and monitoring temperature changes in fluid volumes ranging from microliters to subnanoliters — DNA analysis relies on precise temperature cycling, for example. An alternative to thermometers and temperature probes, which are generally not effective at these dimensions, are noninvasive temperature-sensitive fluorescent dyes (e.g., rhodamine B), whose intensity is inversely proportional to temperature (i.e., as temperatures go up, their intensity goes down). The technique, though, requires basing all reading on the fluorescence at a single reference temperature. Others (NIST researchers, in 2001) have devised "calibration curves" to relate temperature to rhodamine B fluorescent intensity, using a reference temperature of about 23°C, but those are only good for that one temperature.

The new work, described in a paper for Analytical Chemistry, shows that changing the reference point in a microfluidics system (e.g., higher temperatures when first heated) introduces significant errors with such dye intensity calculations using current method — up to an 11°C range of error (-3°C to 8°C) for calibration equations derived at ~23°C, using a simple linear correction for a 40°C reference temperature, according to lead researcher Jayna J. Shah.

To address this, the team devised mathematical models to correct for the shift during reference temperature changes; with this they created generalized calibration equations that can be applied to any reference temperature. Among the applications is amplifying microfluidic DNA (producing numerous copies) by the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which requires cycling a microfluidic device to be cycled through temperatures at three different zones, starting around 65°C — a dye intensity-to-temperature ration would have to be based on that temperature, not the aforementioned 23°C, Shah notes.

September 10, 2009:  A procedure using nanotubes encased within DNA is shown to eliminate cancer tumors but not healthy tissue, according to researchers from Wake Forest U’s School of Medicine.

Their work, published in ACS Nano, starts by encasing multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWNT) in DNA and injecting them into human prostate cancer tumors grown in mice. The DNA coating keeps the MWNTs dispersed in the tumor, allowing them to heat more evenly/efficiently (heat production increased 2x-3x), which means lower levels of radiation can be used.

Heating the tumor with near-infrared radiation (70secs with a 3W laser) causes the MWNTs to vibrate, creating heat which kills nearby cancer cells — in their work, the tumors were gone after six days. Tests on other treatment groups showed the combination of coated MWNTs and laser radiation was key; tumors that were only injected with MWNTs or irradiated by laser showed no distinguishable reduction.

From the ACS Nano abstract:

A single treatment consisting of intratumoral injection of MWNTs (100 μL of a 500 μg/mL solution) followed by laser irradiation at 1064nm, 2.5 W/cm2 completely eradicated PC3 xenograft tumors in 8/8 (100%) of nude mice.

Perhaps the most key result is that the surrounding tissue is "virtualy unharmed" — in tests "a small burn on the skin" at the site of the laser treatment healed in a few days with antibiotic ointment. Current "thermal ablation" (heat therapy) methods rely on heating implanted electrodes, which aren’t selective to cancer cells vs. healthy ones. "That we could eradicate the tumor mass and not harm the tissue is truly amazing," said principal investigator William H. Gmeiner, a professor of cancer biology at the School of Medicine, in a statement.

Future work will involve investigating whether other nanomaterials (e.g. single-walled carbon nanotubes or gold nanoshells) will work effectively. More investigation will be done to gauge long-term impact to the body in terms of toxicity — another reason to DNA-coat the CNTs, is to cautiously use fewer of them.

September 9, 2009:  NanoInk is introducing a contract research program to provide miniaturization and multiplex protein analysis.

The program, part of the company’s "Nano BioDiscovery" division, is based on its patented dip-pen nanolithography platform and its experience in array fabrication. Features of the offering range from complete custom assay development and analysis projects to protein profiling work, to custom array printing. Researchers "develop the custom assay protocol, fabricate the custom nanoarrays, conduct on-array assays, extract and analyze data, and develop a comprehensive final report that includes image files and raw data," explain Bruce Dudzik, senior director for business development, in a statement.

The dip-pen litho technology can deposit highly reproducible submicron protein features in a subarray and pattern up to 96 subarrays per slide. Nanoscale protein arrays enable multi-parallel, high throughput analysis. "By combing DPN nanofabrication technology with optimized substrates and next-generation detection systems for a total system solution, Nano BioDiscovery helps its customers address major proteomic challenge," the company states.

September 8, 2009:  FEI Co. has released two dedicated scanning electron microscopes (SEMs) and a new software package to help forensic scientists better analyze gunshot residues(GSR).

The new SEMs (GSR S50 and GSR F50) and software (Magnum) offer "dramatic improvements in speed, accuracy and affordability," completely automating analysis procedures with features including dedicated validation routines for accurate results and a "beam booster," the company says in a statement.

The S50 can image uncoated samples in low vacuum mode to preserve sample integrity; the F50 field emission source offers higher spatial resolution, putting more beam current into a smaller spot for faster and more precise X-ray analysis. Both SEMs include the new Magnum software, which uses their native imaging capabilities to locate particles instead of conventional X-ray particle imaging and detection. A specially designed beam current booster improves analysis speed and precision.Other features include built-in validation procedures using standard layouts of ENFSI proficiency tests, and compatibility with high count rate silicon drift X-ray detectors from Bruker and EDAX.

September 8, 2009: Panasonic Electric Works has developed a sensor system that recognizes facial features in all lighting: dark, overly bright, and even behind glass, reports the Nikkei Business Daily.

The system, for use in a charge-coupled device (CCD) camera, combines an LED modulated light source for near-infrared light with image-processing circuitry, so that only near-infrared light reflected from the subject is processed; the resulting sharp image  (QVGA-quality monochrome) is captured for face-recognition processing even in bright light that would wash out features, or as a car windshield reflects surrounding scenery, the paper notes. LED modulated light also is unaffected by sunlight or other sources, so it can work in the dark.

The sensor system allows shutter speeds up to 0.002 seconds, capable of identifying passengers in cars traveling up to 50kph; subjects can be up to 2-3m away (or up to ~10m by adding more LEDs).

Commercialization for the sensor system is planned for spring 2010; initial applications include security/crime prevention, such as cameras in structures like buildings and parking garages, and biometric identification. ATMs also could use the system to identify users by hand vein patterns, since conventional biometric readers encounter interfere by bright light in outdoor settings.

September 2, 2009: A new Microelectronics Innovation Center is being formed at the Université de Sherbrooke in Bromont, Québec, to focus on 200mm microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and 3D wafer-level packaging (WLP), and “advanced technologies associated with the assembly and packaging of silicon chips.”

Initial investments come from the governments of Québec ($94.95M) and Canada ($82.95M), and another $40.6M from center cofounders DALSA, IBM Canada, and the U. of Sherbrooke along with unidentified semiconductor equipment suppliers. Participatory interest also has been expressed by other universities, research centers, and industrial partners both in Canada and globally, they note.

The group’s stated “prime purpose” is to “leverage the best from the Canadian and international research community to address industry’s most challenging problems,” with end goals of both technology transfer and spinoffs. It also will be the centerpiece of a planned “true microelectronics cluster in Québec” hoped to extend from activities centered around Albany, NY. An estimated 250 researchers will be involved, and >3000 jobs will be created.

“The project marks the birth of a value chain that could eventually match the Québec economy’s flagship innovation sectors — life sciences, aerospace, and computer technologies,” said Clément Gignac., Minister of Economic Development, Innovation and Export Trade, in a statement.

September 2, 2009 – Nearly 150 speakers will address new technologies for materials, pharma/biotech, energy/environment, and other nanotech-related topics at next week’s NanoBusiness 2009 conference (Sept. 8-10, McCormick Place, Chicago).

On tap for the NanoBusiness sessions include talks on innovation with nanotech from execs within Fortune 500 companies, next-gen tech startups, and longtime nanotech-focused venture capitalists. Keynote speaker is Segway inventor Dean Kamen, who also spearheads efforts to get kids interested/learning about science and technology via his “FIRST” (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) organization. Sessions also will focus on nanotech commercialization’s impact on the environment, as well as policy issues on patent reform, chemicals, and safe workplace practices.

A quick scan of application-focused panels includes:

  • Emerging markets/segments for nanotech and nanomaterials
  • Carbon nanotube “breakthroughs”
  • Nanomaterials
  • Nanotechnology and cancer: diagnostic, therapeutic solutions
  • Pharmaceutical compounds and “soft nanotechnology”
  • Battery technologies
  • Printed and flexible electronics
  • Solar energy and water energy
  • Energy research and “nanoscale discoveries”
  • Water and wastewater treatment