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3.3 General Market Description

3.3.1        Nanotechnology Impact

3.3.2        Drivers and Barriers to Innovation

3.3.3        Relevant Sector Segmentation and Applications

Materials science can be defined roughly as "the study of substances from which something else is made or can be made; the synthesis, properties, and applications of these substances." This definition covers natural and synthetic, traditional and advanced materials^[6]. The market potential for selected nanomaterials and nanolayers is summarised in Table 1^[7],[8]. The limitations in evaluating the world market figures are as follows:

• Market data is only available for a part of the nanomaterials, hence the list is incomplete;
• Market forecasts partly refer to different time horizons;
• The evaluations of market figures can differ significantly from source to source even for the same nanomaterials.

Therefore, the given market figures can be at best serve for a very rough estimation of the market size.

Table 1: Assessment of the annual world market volume for selected nanomaterials (Source: N. Malanowski, T. Heimer, W. Luther, M. Werner: Growth Market Nanotechnology, Wiley 2006)  

The overall world market for materials is clearly impossible to predict. Also the application fields and markets for nanomaterials are very fragmented. Therefore, selected market figures for specific nanomaterials will be highlighted in the following sub-sections.