March 8 - Nanotechnology

I listened to a podcast of Thursday's Future Tense on Radio National and heard a really interesting story about a collaboration between universities in Australia and China in the field of nanotechnology.

The exact description of the partnership is the Australian Technology Network, a group of five universities in Australia, and ISTA, the International Strategic Technology Alliance which is a consortium of Chinese tertiary institutions.

"The partnership has its focus on the development of nanotechnology. That is, the science of using and manipulating extremely small particles to perform certain tasks or to achieve certain results."

One of the areas that nanotechnology is being applied to is in environmental science and I've copied part of the transcript from the show to illustrate how potentially useful this work is.

"Mike Ford: One of the big areas that we work in is energy efficiency. So, for example, a really big issue in Australia is cooling houses, and the way we generally do that is with air-conditioning, which has significant problems for a number of reasons. It's a huge drain on energy, there's all sorts of other issues involved with it.

So what we're trying to do there is to try and come up with ways of making materials that can help us cool buildings without using lots of electricity. An example of that is you can take nanoparticles, very, very small particles of gold, and these are typically in the range of maybe one thousandth of the diameter of a human hair, so if you coat those on to a window, you can make the window so that it absorbs infra-red light, which is the heat that comes from the sun; you can block out that part of the sun's light, but let through all the visible light. So from the inside of the building it looks very, very similar but none of the heat gets through, or a lot less of the heat gets through. So you don't obviously have to air-condition the inside of the building.

One of the other areas that we work in is one of the really big sources of energy usage, is lighting. So we all light our houses, factories, like the insides of their buildings and so on and so forth, traffic lights, car lights, whatever, and we use light sources that are very inefficient. And one of the other projects we're working on is to try and find ways of making light sources that are very, very efficient, that last a long, long time, so you don't have all of the environmental disposal issues associated with it, you don't use so much electricity in generating the light, and one of the ways that this is going to go in the future is to use what's called solid-state lighting. These are LEDs, basically, and so we've seen LEDs.

The real challenge now is to be able to make those LEDs very, very cheaply, so that you can put them into every light bulb in every single house, and in the short term, the energy saving associated with that is enormous. So these are really good short-term solutions to things like climate change."

it's encouraging to think that there are developments going on that will eventually result in very beneficial outcomes.