Nano nations

Posted Aug. 23, 2007

By Candi S. Cross

The realities of war, at least in the public’s mind, rarely share head room with science. But in Darfur, Sudan, and other places where people have been killed for fresh water, science supersedes any other denominator that has the power to intervene. Analysts insist that environmental calamity is a driving force behind years of conflict, disease, and the displacement of more than 2 million people in Darfur.

With the surprising discovery of an underground lake in the Darfur region, the drilling of 1,000 wells couldn’t happen soon enough. A team from Boston University Center for Remote Sensing used radar data to find the lake, which is comparable in size to Lake Erie (the 10th largest lake in the world). The water will have to undergo a variety of tests to determine if poisonous metals, germs, or proteins may delay quenching the region’s thirst.

And as the science to support important applications around this breakthrough and others, nanotechnology will also be put to the test.

“There are philanthropic organizations that are committed to funding applications that provide cleaning drinking water everywhere -- in no small part, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for instance,” said David Berube, Ph.D., professor of communication studies and a member of the NanoScience and Technology Studies at the University of South Carolina. “The alternative is usually choleric diseases, and since millions of kids die because of bad water, there is not much argument regarding the funding or the research and development around filter systems using carbon nanotubes.”

Notwithstanding the gee-whiz nano consumer news shouting from the headlines, water replenishment and environmental sustenance in general is one of the least touted capabilities of nano. Additional industries that stand to gain from nanotechnology include cosmetics, medicine, aerospace, energy, and military. However, with more than 97 percent of the water in the world being saltwater and only a third of the remaining fresh water supply being functional, one of the most significant applications of nanotechnology could be solving the severe shortage of pure drinking water. Created by eMembrane, the nanoscale polymer brush, coated with molecules to capture and remove dangerous contaminants, is one example of products being measured for their reliability.  

It’s difficult to keep up with the buzz around products and materials like buckypaper, a thin sheet of carbon nanotube that shows promise as a building material for body armor, aerospace vehicles, and electronics. What’s missing from the excitement around nanotechnology’s many possibilities are the topics of education and preparedness behind systems and processes this newer realm of science requires.

“IE has always been concerned with the integration of materials, energy, information, machinery, and human capital. Nano-materials are part of the materials world -- they only differ from the ‘traditional’ materials we were used to in length scale,” said Ben Wang, Ph.D., assistant vice president of research in engineering at Florida State University’s High-Performance Materials Institute and an IIE fellow. “The instrumentations and approaches we use to study nano-materials will be different from those for macroscopic materials. Nevertheless, nano-materials and IE are a perfect fit. There are many significant and relevant research topics for IE, such as process development, process characterization, process modeling, statistical process control, only to name a few.”

Wang also points out that nano-materials are still relatively expensive, and some industries are not able to pass extra costs to their consumer base. This may determine the number of jobs that will initially be available to IEs in manufacturing, systems design, distribution, reliability, and quality control. Budget is certainly a factor in the top five industries that have enjoyed an accelerated pace of nano-movement, including direct consumer-driven manufacturing (particularly cosmetics), which allows for more reliability engineering positions based on the industry’s capacity for risk.

The cosmetics market is growing by 10 percent worldwide annually because of the popularity of products billed as “anti-aging.” For example, L’Oreal, the world’s largest cosmetics company, has devoted millions of dollars to nanotechnology research, which it believes offers great potential for slowing the effect of age on skin and hair. And yet, neither the U.S. Food and Drug Administration nor corresponding regulatory agencies in other countries have done much in the way of imposing manufacturing and marketing standards. Little is known about toxicity levels of nano-particles deep in the skin or near the eyes though the success of Botox alone, for example, attests to the cost people will pay in the name of youth or beauty.

This trend of “unreliability” disturbs both Berube and Way Kuo, Ph.D., university distinguished professor and dean of engineering at the University of Tennessee.

“The thing about cosmetics that we don’t want to admit is that none of it works. It’s a luxury item,” said Berube, who has been vocal about the societal and ethical interactions of emerging technologies. “We need medicine to live, we need water to survive, we don’t need cosmetics. Cosmetics will pose problems in the way that nanotechnology will be viewed; there’s a whole bunch of contact issues. There’s a psychological process around it though that strangely enough, we need to stave off the aging process.”

Kuo, a fellow of IIE, insists that no matter what industries vie for R&D dollars or public accolades, quality control must be systematic, and IEs are essential to the planning and manufacturing.

“New ideas and connections stimulated by modern advancements are appearing in the bio, energy, and computing fields, while design, manufacturing, and reliability modeling are being left behind. We are already developing the scientific base -- nano-theory, fabrication science, materials sophistication, and manufacturing capabilities for a full-scale assault on nanotechnology,” said Kuo, “but we must ask if the manufacturing community is ready for producing nano-devices and whether the reliability community is ready to certify proper use of these nano-device systems. We must be leaders in guaranteeing that high-tech products and systems perform to acceptable modern standards.

“I believe that manufacturing is not over in the United States. In particular, nano-manufacturing will soon start after the R&D work is ready for dissemination. Of course, unless industrial engineers are properly trained in the nano-subjects, we will not be able to play the game along with others in the emerging disciplines.”

Candi S. Cross is the Institute of Industrial Engineers' managing editor.