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The National Nanomanufacturing Network Volume 2 Issue 2 - February 2009
The NNN Newsletter

Nanomaterials Regulations: Balancing Insight with Oversight

balance

Emerging nanomaterials and nano-enabled consumer products are projected to have a significant, global impact on future economic, societal, and quality-of-life issues. The field of nanotechnology in general—and nanomanufacturing processes and nanomanufactured materials in particular—present a new regulatory paradigm for commercial sectors, academics, and government oversight and funding agencies alike. In essense, how do we responsibly maintain the critical balance between the necessity of regulatory oversight and the industry of scientific innovation?

The issues at hand are the extent to which governments ought to regulate manufacturers and suppliers that fall within new nanomaterials categories and the appropriate balance between industrial self-regulation and stringent government oversight. Exacerbating the decision making in this area are inferences of specific toxicity properties that have been reported based on less-than-comprehensive scientific studies, subsequent public dissemination of incomplete information by the media, and the rapid rate of change in science and technology which resists persistent modes of regulation.

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Regards,
Jeff Morse, Managing Director,
National Nanomanufacturing Network

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Report from National Science Foundation Workshop: Research Challenges for Integrated Systems Nanomanufacturing

The report from the NSF Workshop on Integrated Nanomanufacturing Systems is now available. The two-day workshop brought together approximately 25 leading experts to identify key issues for manufacturing of nanotechnology-enabled products and to begin the process of categorizing specific concerns for individual product technologies and segments. The goal of this workshop was to elucidate the key research challenges facing Integrated Systems Nanomanufacturing, thereby providing a roadmap of the near term and long term focus areas that must be addressed. The workshop also addressed the theory of systems-level behavior of integrated nanosystems, including how nanoscale phenomena ultimately affect the characteristics and operability of macroscale systems. More...

Hybrid Coaxial Nanotubes for Lithium Batteries

Reddy et. al. report in Nano Letters the synthesis and electrochemical testing of hybrid coaxial MnO2/Carbon Nanotube array electrodes for lithium battery applications. Such a hybrid nanostructure for Li-ion battery electrodes benefits from the high electrical conductivity of the nanotube core, while exploiting the high Li storage capacity of the porous MnO2 shell material. With the high aspect ratio of the hybrid nanotube configuration and the ultra-high surface area associated with the entire array, the potential exists to engineer the battery electrodes for long life while significantly enhancing the Li storage capacity. More...

Low Temperature Growth of Patterned ZnO Nanowire Arrays

One significant challenge in nanomanufacturing is the development of simple techniques to deposit or grow nanomaterials uniformly across large regions, while simultaneously controlling the spacing and arrangement of the individual particles or structures. Recent efforts to grow nanomaterials directly onto substrates or devices has met with some success, though challenges still remain in devising synthetic routes that are compatible with the standard lithographic approaches used to form integrated circuits. A recent article from Z. L. Wang’s group at Georgia Tech (Xu, et al., JACS, 2008, 130(45), 14958-14959) demonstrates a new technique to grow arrays of aligned ZnO nanowires onto a variety of inorganic substrates, without the use of metal catalysts or extreme synthesis conditions that could disrupt underlying device structures. More...

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February 22 - 27, 2009
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Affiliated Centers

NSF Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center for Hierarchical Manufacturing
NSF Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center for High-rate Nanomanufacturing
Center for Nanoscale Chemical-Electrical-Mechanical Manufacturing Systems
NSF Center for Scalable and Integrated Nanomanufacturing
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