Successful Business Leadership

By Alan K Rudi

The material sciences deal with the development and application of physical, chemical or biological properties of materials (e.g., ceramics, metals, glass, plastics and composites) for an industrial purpose. For example, materials technologies are making planes lighter, stronger, and less expensive. In automobiles, new materials and fabrication techniques are making auto parts lighter, stronger, easier to manufacture, more durable, and less expensive. Semiconductors, metals, and ceramics are used today in integrated electronic circuits, optoelectronic devices, and magnetic or optical data storage devices. Research is ongoing into the principles that integrate or combine physics and chemistry, and electronic and chemical sciences to create new properties and materials.

One of the most promising areas of material sciences is in nanotechnology, which is “the manipulation and manufacture of materials and devices on the scale of atoms or small groups of atoms and are typically measured in nanometers, or billionths of a meter. Materials built at this scale often exhibit distinctively new or different physical and chemical properties. Usable devices this small may be decades away, but techniques for production at the nano-scale have become essential to electronic engineering today.” Possibilities for the future include:

• The ability to manufacture lighter, stronger, and programmable materials

• Nano-coatings for opaque and translucent surfaces will be more resistant to corrosion, scratches, and radiation.

• Electronic, magnetic, and mechanical devices and systems with information processing that provide sensors for protection, health care, manufacturing, and the environment.

• New photoelectric materials will enable the manufacture of cost-efficient solar energy panels.

• Molecular-semiconductor hybrid devices may become the engines of the next information age.

Scientists, however, still must learn how to manipulate and characterize individual atoms and small groups of atoms. Nanotechnology products must provide improved performance and lower costs. New types of raw materials will come from the atoms of abundant natural resources such as carbon, hydrogen, and silicon creating nano-structured materials that have the properties desired for a particular application. Nanotechnology ultimately may allow people to fabricate almost any type of material or product. See a video of this technology and manufacturing.

A revolution in the fabrication of nano-scale machines and devices for use in microscopic systems is envisioned, affecting information technologies, energy sources, agricultural products, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and materials used in manufacturing. The dimensions of electronic circuits on semiconductors continue to shrink with minimum sizes now reaching far less than 100 nanometers. Magnetic memory materials used in hard disk drives have achieved dramatically greater memory density as a result of nano-scale structuring, are creating new magnetic effects. (Source: understanding nanotechnology)