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3.3.1 Nanotechnology Impact

The most important feature is that the nanoscale building blocks - because of their sizes below about 100 nm - offer improved properties and functionality that are unavailable in conventional materials and devices. The reason for this is that materials in this size range can exhibit fundamentally new behaviour when their sizes fall below the critical length scale associated with any given property. The wavelike properties of electrons inside matter are influenced by variations on the nanometre scale. By patterning matter on the nanometre length scale, it is possible to vary fundamental properties of materials, for instance melting temperature, magnetisation, charge capacity, or colour, without changing the chemical composition. One example of the change of the physical properties of nanostructured materials is sketched in Fig. 2. Bulk nanostructured materials are defined as bulk solids with nanoscale or partly nanoscale structures. Nearly all of the physical properties change when compared with "conventional" materials.

Fig. 2: Examples of physical properties of nanostructured materials

Consequently, macroscopic materials with fundamentally new properties can be designed. Table 2 illustrates the effects and applications of the reduced dimensionality of nanomaterials. Furthermore, the addition of nanoparticles to an otherwise homogenous material can lead to a change in the macroscopic material behaviour.

Table 2: Effects and applications due to the reduced dimension

Experimental results show that nanostructured materials and composites clearly offer improved properties and functionality. The number of potential commercial applications that will be offered by nanotechnology is limitless. Among the key application areas that are already in the market or that will be implemented within the next five years, many are based on the use of nanosized particles.