Benefits of Digital Nanofabrication |
Digital Nanofabrication will bring numerous benefits in which material properties and size will become among the most important.
It is difficult, if not impossible to predict all the possible benefits that would come along with DN, but we can predict a few. DN will without a doubt give the consumer better products. We will see products in which the designer determines the placement of every single atom and this can give us products with unprecedented purity or any other desired characteristic that will benefit the particular product. There will be an endless number of ways to combine different atoms and create new materials with specific properties (we can expect that the search for new materials will intensify greatly as DN becomes a reality).
Another significant benefit is the size of future products. Many industries and especially the electronics industries spend billions in attempts to make their products smaller and thus also lighter, but they will not reach their goal until DN becomes a reality. Nanofabrication technology is currently largely sponsored by the computer industry, which seeks to create smaller and faster computer chips. Smaller and faster computer chips means faster and smaller computers, which in turn will lead to pretty much all electronics becoming smaller and faster.
In addition to the many benefits already listed, one of the most integral advancements will be an even more accurate product for consumers. When using nanotechnology, there is much less room for error since it is on such a small scale (building atom by atom). With this furthered accuracy, there are many more possibilities for characteristics and properties of products as well. (see Future Products) And although nanofabrication may be much more expensive at first, the prices will eventually become very reasonable for better processed materials as well as cheaper production. Thus, overall, once nanofabbing has the ability to be used digitally through something similar to CAD, it will only continue to improve the aforementioned characteristics of products.*
Research has shown that there is virtually no kinetic fiction involved in mechanical nanofabricated bearings, similar to the one pictured above. The lack of friction has several important benefits; there is no longer a need for oil or other forms of lubrication, the bearings do not get heated regardless of the speed they rotate at and there is finally no ware, so replacement is never needed.
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