Nanoscale effect, examples

As physical structures used in technological applications have been reduced in size, there has been an increasing need to understand the limiting processes of adhesion and to try to minimize them. For example, adhesion due to humidity is known to have a major effect on the durabihty and friction forces experienced at the recording head/disk interface. Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) are also detrimentally affected by nanoscale adhesion, with their motion being perturbed or prevented. 

These two examples show that regular patterns can evolve but, by definition, dissipative structures disappear once the thermodynamic equilibrium has been reached. When one wants to use dissipative structures for patterning of materials, the dissipative structure has to be fixed. Then, even though the thermodynamic instability that led to and supported the pattern has ceased, the structure would remain. Here, polymers play an important role. Since many polymers are amorphous, there is the possibility to freeze temporal patterns. Furthermore, polymer solutions are nonlinear with respect to viscosity and thus strong effects are expected to be seen in evaporating polymer solutions. Since a macromolecule is a nanoscale object, conformational entropy will also play a role in nanoscale ordered structures of polymers. 

Several recent molecular dynamics simulations (e.g. [10] and references therein) have focussed on the wetting of interfaces (Section 6.1) and, for example, the behaviour of very small droplets at the nanoscale. Such simulations are able to relate the atomistic behaviour directly to relevant macroscopic parameters such as the contact angle and are able to show the dramatic effects at this length scale of addition of surfactant molecules or roughening of the surface. 

HREM methods are powerful in the study of nanometre-sized metal particles dispersed on ceramic oxides or any other suitable substrate. In many catalytic processes employing supported metallic catalysts, it has been established that the catalytic properties of some structure-sensitive catalysts are enhanced with a decrease in particle size. For example, the rate of CO decomposition on Pd/mica is shown to increase five-fold when the Pd particle sizes are reduced from 5 to 2 nm. A similar size dependence has been observed for Ni/mica. It is, therefore, necessary to observe the particles at very high resolution, coupled with a small-probe high-precision micro- or nanocomposition analysis and micro- or nanodiffraction where possible. Advanced FE-(S)TEM instruments are particularly effective for composition analysis and diffraction on the nanoscale. ED patterns from particles of diameter of 1 nm or less are now possible. 

Today the frontier of the fabrication of electronic devices has moved from the micrometer scale down to tens of nanometers scale. Scaled-down conventional devices such as field-effect transistors and devices based on quantum effects are two most prominent examples of the electronic miniaturisation [20, 23,430]. The major challenges in preparation of such devices are (i) growing the substrate materials and (ii) patterning the substrates. Whereas the former rely on self-organisation of the surface structure, the substrate patterning on the nanoscale requires special tools. 

With the advent of nanomaterials, different types of polymer-based composites developed as multiple scale analysis down to the nanoscale became a trend for development of new materials with new properties. Multiscale materials modeling continue to play a role in these endeavors as well. For example, Qian et al. [257] developed multiscale, multiphysics numerical tools to address simulations of carbon nanotubes and their associated effects in composites, including the mechanical properties of Young s modulus, bending stiffness, buckling, and strength. Maiti [258] also used multiscale modeling of carbon nanotubes for microelectronics applications. Friesecke and James [259] developed a concurrent numerical scheme to evaluate nanotubes and nanorods in a continuum. 

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