This link has been bookmarked by 8 people . It was first bookmarked on 11 Dec 2006, by Martin Colwell.
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20 Oct 11
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03 Jul 10
Gaizka Ortiz de UrbinaTimeline for Molecular Manufacturing ◄ YOU ARE HERE Personal Nanofactories (PNs)
Products of Molecular Manufacturing
Benefits of Molecular Manufacturing
Dangers of Molecular Manufacturing
No Simple Solutions
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07 Aug 09
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A small nano-robotic device that can use supplied chemicals to manufacture nanoscale products under external control is called a fabricator.
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This is mostly a matter of simple mechanics. The integration of the mechanochemical device with other devices to support the parts and product, deliver "feedstock" chemicals from an uncontrolled exterior to a well-controlled interior, and so on should also be relatively straightforward—at least compared with designing a spacecraft.
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By contrast, a fabricator design must account for chemistry, mechanical engineering including stiffness, control structures, and a different set of forces than we're used to at the macro-scale (e.g. van der Waals force). Note that many problems can be treated as mechanical engineering issues without greatly increasing the size and complexity of the fabricator. One example is thermal noise: as analyzed in Nanosystems, if the parts are stiff enough, it's not a problem even at room temperature.
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Diamond has 176 carbon atoms per cubic nanometer, so if each part were only one cubic nanometer, a fabricator might have 6 million parts—comparable to the Shuttle. With parts 10 nanometers on a side, it would have only 6,000 parts. For comparison, a typical four-cylinder automobile engine has about 450 parts and a bacterium may have 3,600 different molecules. As opposed to a "wet" design like a bacterium or a cutting-edge aerospace design, most of a fabricator's parts would not interact with each other and could be designed separately. It appears, then, that design of a fabricator falls somewhere between a car engine and the Space Shuttle in complexity. Construction, if not feasible today, will be feasible soon.
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11 Dec 06
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20 May 06
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