Engineering of Nanostructured Materials

Abstract

The essence of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology is the ability to fabricate and engineer materials, structures and systems where the manipulation of the properties and functionalities is a result of the control of the material’s building blocks whose dimension is in the nanometer regime. Nanostructured materials can be advantageously engineered by the controlled assembly of several suitable nano-objects as building blocks. While materials properties are determined by their atomic and molecular constituents and structure, their functionalities emerge when the microstructure of these early ensembles are in the nanometer regime. The properties and functionalities of these ensembles may be different as their size grows from nano-regime to the micron regime and bulk structures. Nanotechnology offers a unique possibility to manipulate properties through the fabrication of materials using the nano-objects as building blocks. Thereby, Nanotechnology is considered an enabling technology by which existing materials, virtually all man-made materials, can acquire novel properties and functionalities, is suitable for numerous novel applications varying from structural and functional to advanced biomedical in-vivo and in-vitro applications.