Applications Of Nanotechnology In Textiles And Other Fields

Nanotechnology is an emerging interdisciplinary technology that has been booming in many areas during the recent decade, including materials science, mechanics, electronics, optics, medicine, plastics, energy, electronics, and aerospace. Its profound societal impact has been considered as the huge momentum to usher in a second industrial revolution. The "nanD" in nanotechnolgy comes from the Greek word "nanos" that means dwarf. Scientists use this prefix to indicate 1 0-9 or one-billionth. One nanometer is one-billionth meter that is about 1 00,000 times smaller than the diameter of a single human hair.

Nanotechnology endeavors are aimed at manipulating atoms, molecules and nanosize particles in a precise and controlled manner in order to build materials with a fundamentally new organization and novel properties. The embryo of nanotechnology is "atomic assembly", which was first publicly articulated in 1959 by physicist Richard Feynman. Nanotechnology is called a "bottom up" technology by which bulk materials can be built precisely in tiny building blocks, different from the traditional manufacture "top down" technology. Therefore, resultant materials have fewer defects and higher quality. The fundamentals of nanotechnology lie in the fact that properties of substances dramatically change when their size is reduced to the nanometer range. When a ulk material is divided into small size particles with one or more dimension (length, width, or thickness) in the nanometer range or even smaller, the individual particles exhibit unexpected properties, different from those of the bulk material. It is known that atoms and molecules possess totally different behaviors than those of bulk materials; while the properties of the former are described by quantum mechanics, the properties of the latter are governed by classic mechanics. Between these two distinct domains, the nanometer range is a murky threshold for the transition of a material's behavior. For example, ceramics, which normally are brittle, can easily be made deformable when their grain size is reduced to the low nanometer range. A gold particle of 1 nm across shows red color. Moreover, a small amount of nanosize species can interfere with matrix polymer that is usually in the similar size range, bringing up the performance of resultant system to an unprecedented level. These are the reasons why nanotechnology has attracted large amounts of federal funding, research activity and media attention. The textile industry has already impacted by nanotechnology. Research involving nanotechnology to improve performances or to create unprecedented functions of textile materials are flourishing. These research endeavors are mainly focused on using nanosize substances and generating nanostructures during manufacturing and finishing processes.