Could nanotechnology revolutionize natural gas industry?
2007-10-31 00:35:00
Nanotechnology could revolutionize the natural gas industry across the whole lifecycle from extraction to pollution reduction or be an enormous missed opportunity, claim two industry experts writing in Inderscience's International Journal of Nanotechnology. They suggest that nanotechnology could help us extract more fuel and feedstock hydrocarbons from dwindling resources. However, industry inertia and a lack of awareness of the benefits could mean a missed opportunity.
According to Saeid Mokhatab and Brian Towler of the Chemical and Petroleum Engineering Department, at the University of Wyoming [profile], in Laramie, there are many opportunities for the industry to exploit nanotechnology. However, there is a traditional lack of innovation in the exploration and production sector, a perception of high costs, new risks, and a general lack of awareness of the benefits of nanotechnology.
The researchers have now described the potential benefits of nanotechnology, which could change that perception. Mokhatab and Towler point out that nanomaterials, such as nanotubes or engineered porous minerals, might be used in the gas field or other source to improve the efficiency of extraction of a wide variety of hydrocarbon fuel compounds and chemical feedstocks.
Nanotech will replace disk drives in 10 years, researcher says
2007-11-05 02:01:00
Nanotechnology will replace magnetic disk drives in iPods, laptops and servers within five to 10 years, making them more durable, lighter and faster.
That's according to Michael Kozicki, a researcher at Arizona State University [profile] who is developing ways to store data in nanowires instead of as electrons in cells. He's also researching ways to stack multiple layers of memory on top of a single layer of silicon.
All of this, Kozicki said, would mean dramatic advances in storage, as well as dramatic differences in the way we use our favorite devices.
"Someday you'll store all your music, movies, photos and favorite TV shows on something the size of an iPod. It'll all be right there," said Kozicki. "Nanotechnology will replace all the disk drives in the world. Sure, we could create a terabyte thumb drive, but if you could do that, why would you use magnetic disks that are everywhere from iPods to servers to data farms? If you drop a device, it could wreck the fragile disc drive. Not with this, though."
If device manufacturers can get rid of disk drives, laptops and MP3 players would be significantly more durable, faster and lighter, according to Kozicki. They also would boot up immediately and have much better memory capacity.
What are the ultimate limits to miniaturization? How small can machinery--with internal workings that move, turn, and vibrate--be produced? What is the smallest scale on which computers can be built?
With uncanny and characteristic insight, these are questions that the legendary Caltech physicist Richard Feynman [profile] asked himself in the period leading up to a famous 1959 lecture, the first on a topic now called nanotechnology. In a newly announced global Alliance for Nanosystems VLSI (very-large-scale integration), researchers at Caltech's Kavli Nanoscience Institute (KNI) in Pasadena, California, and at the Laboratoire d'Electronique et de Technologie de l'Information-Micro- and Nano-Technologies (CEA/LETI-MINATEC) in Grenoble, France, are working together to take the pursuit of this vision to an entirely new level.
For about three decades after Feynman's lecture, scientists paid little heed to what was apparently viewed as his fanciful dreams in this regard. But more recently, particularly in the past two decades, the field of nanotechnology has been solidly established. Underlying this is an immense amount of careful research, carried out in laboratories worldwide-work that has been realized one advance at a time.
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