Nanotechnology in the Chemical Industry – Opportunities and Challenges

The traditional chemical industry has become a largely mature industry with many commodity products based on established technologies. Therefore, new product and market opportunities will more likely come from speciality chemicals, and from new functionalities obtained from new processing technologies as well as new microstructure control methodologies. It is a well-known fact that in addition to its molecular structure, the microstructure of a material is key to determining its properties. Controlling structures at the micro- and nano-levels is therefore essential to new discoveries. For this article, we define nanotechnology as the controlled manipulation of nanomaterials with at least one dimension less than 100nm. Nanotechnology is emerging as one of the principal areas of investigation that is integrating chemistry and materials science, and in some cases integrating these with biology to create new and yet undiscovered properties that can be exploited to gain new market opportunities. In this article market opportunities for nanotechnology will be presented from an industrial perspective covering electronic, biomedical, performance materials, and consumer products. Manufacturing technology challenges will be identified, including operations ranging from particle formation, coating, dispersion, to characterization, modeling, and simulation. Finally, a nanotechnology innovation roadmap is proposed wherein the interplay between the development of nanoscale building blocks, product design, process design, and value chain integration is identified. A suggestion is made for an R&D model combining market pull and technology push as a way to quickly exploit the advantages in nanotechnology and translate these into customer benefits.     

Optical Diffractive Memories: Angular Selectivity and Diffraction Efficiency in Dichromated Gelatin

Two thousand images of resolution 512×512 pixels as a regular matrix pattern of 10×10 elements are stored, where each element is angularly multiplexed 20 times in a 25 μm thickness of dichromated gelatin emulsion without cross-talk effect. The surface area of the matrix is 1 cm². We show good concordance of the angular selectivity between the experimental result and theory. The diffraction efficiency of each 20 multiplexed images is measured and has nearly the same value. Examples of reconstructed images for multiple applications are given, for example, storage of 160,000 images on a 3′1/2 floppy disc format, which is about 100 min of black and white film. Application can be made to automobile cartography and storage of X-ray images as well as weather forecast images. Colored diffractive images are also possible and are illustrated.     

High-resolution infrared spectra of NCCN and NCCN

High-resolution spectra of ¹⁵N¹²C¹²C¹⁵N and ¹⁴N¹³C¹³C¹⁴N have been measured and analyzed from 200 to 3600 cm⁻¹. All the vibrational levels below 900 cm⁻¹ have been observed and characterized. The Fermi resonance between ν₂ and 2ν₄ has been studied and the resonance constant has been determined for several cases. Several Σ⁻ states have been directly observed for the first time for each isotopomer, the (0001111)0f, (0011111)0f, and (0002222)0f states. The pattern of the energy levels for clusters of l-type resonance coupled levels, such as 0001131,3, has been determined for cyanogen for the first time. Among other things this involved the determination of the vibrational l-type resonance constant, r₄₅. Many of the power series constants, α_i and x_ij, and higher order constants have been determined.     

Analysis of Antennas with PBG Substrate

The use of photonic materials has been used in the theory of optical waves. The PBG (Photonic Band Gap) theory and material, was developed recently for optical frequencies and can be easily applied to millimeter waves, microwaves and planar antenna frequencies. The presence of photonic materials as substrate in antennas has some good characteristics such as, supression of light spontaneous emission and suppression of surface waves, allowing the application in planar antenna array. In this work an elaborate analysis using the full wave Transverse Transmission Line - TTL method, that provides efficient and concise results is applied to the planar antennas array with PBG substrate.     

Book Reviews

Unsigned book reviews are by the Book Review Editor.     

Supercompactness and measurable limits of strong cardinals II: Applications to level by level equivalence

We construct models for the level by level equivalence between strong compactness and supercompactness in which for κ the least supercompact cardinal and δ ≤ κ any cardinal which is either a strong cardinal or a measurable limit of strong cardinals, 2^δ > δ ⁺ and δ is < 2^δ supercompact. In these models, the structure of the class of supercompact cardinals can be arbitrary, and the size of the power set of κ can essentially be made as large as desired. This extends and generalizes [5, Theorem 2] and [4, Theorem 4]. We also sketch how our techniques can be used to establish a weak indestructibility result. (© 2006 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)     

Transfer of near-infrared monochromator calibrations for tobacco constituents to tilting-filter instruments

Near-infrared calibrations for water, reducing sugar, glycerin, propylene glycol, nicotine, and menthol in tobacco blends were first obtained with a monochromator instrument. Transfer of calibrations to a tilting-filter instrument for factory trials is shown to be facilitated greatly by the computer-assisted scheme MTRAN. By means of this software, calibration equations were established for a Neotec 51A instrument that is sufficiently rugged for factory use. The predictive capabilities of the transferred calibrations are similar to those of the research monochromator.     

A note on the complexity and tractability of the heat equation

We wish to solve the heat equation u_t=Δu-qu in I^d×(0,T), where I is the unit interval and T is a maximum time value, subject to homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions and to initial conditions u(·,0)=f over I^d. We show that this problem is intractable if f belongs to standard Sobolev spaces, even if we have complete information about q. However, if f and q belong to a reproducing kernel Hilbert space with finite-order weights, we can show that the problem is tractable, and can actually be strongly tractable.