Résumé : |
Nanofibers — polymer filaments only a couple of hundred nanometers in diameter — have a huge range of potential applications, from solar tells to water filtration to fuel tells. But so far, their high cost of manufacture has relegated them to just a few niche industries. Researchers of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Boston, MA/USA, describe a new technique for producing nanofibers that increases the rate of production 4-fold while reducing energy consumption by more than 90%, holding out the prospect of cheap, efficient nanofiber production.
A systematic way was demonstrated in MIT's Microsystems Technology Laboratories to produce nanofi bers throug h electrospinning that surpasses the state-of-the-art, which opens a very interesting possibility. The group of researchers are working to push 3D printing further, to make it possible to print components that transduce, that actuate, that exchange energy between different domains, like solar to electrical or mechanical. They have something that naturally fits into that picture. They have an array of emitters that can be thought of as a dot-matrix printer, where it would be possible to individually control each emitter to print deposits of nanofibers. |