Nanotechnology in the Automotive Industry

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Nanotechnology-The Automotive Industry What is Nanotechnology? Nanotechnology is the engineering of materials on the scale of 1 nanometer (nm) to 100 nm, a nanometer being 1 billionth of a meter. Nanotechnology is a bottom-up approach where materials are created by placing individual atoms together. This decreases the randomness in the structural formation, enabling significant control over the properties of the material. Mechanical properties such as strength, ductility, and resilience can all be incorporated into one material. Currently, nanotechnology is functioning as an enabling technology. It is being used to enhance the properties of existing materials. This is largely attributed to the fact that the technology has clearly not been understood and there is still much more to nanotechnology than meets the microscopic eye. It is rare for a single technology to have the power to dramatically influence almost every major industry in the world. Nanotechnology falls into this category and offers fundamentally new capabilities to architect a broad array of novel materials, composites and structures on a molecular scale. This technology has the potential to drastically redefine the methods used for developing lighter, stronger, and high-performance structures and processes with unique and non-traditional properties. After more than 20 years of basic nanoscience research and about 10 years of focused R&D under the NNI, applications of nanotechnology are delivering in both expected and unexpected ways on nanotechnology’s promise to benefit society. Nanotechnology is helping to considerably improve, even revolutionize, many technology and industry sectors like information technology, energy, environmental science, medicine, homeland security, food safety, and transportation, among many others. Most benefits of nanotechnology depend on the fact that it
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