Re: why atomic precision assemblers?

From: Eugene Leitl (eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Mon Jan 24 2000 - 14:03:08 MST


Robert Bradbury writes:

> Strictly speaking it doesn't decrease the heat dissipation, it
> simply shifts most of it in time and location to the polymer
> subunit synthesis stage. The only thing that decreases the

You can synthesize monomers from cheap C1 stock (methane) cheaply en
bulk, partly using the energy of the educt (exergonic reaction
pathways or coupling to exergonic pathways).

Even if we were using the same amount of energy, the energy density in
the polymerisation stage is much diluted, since shifted to the
precursors.

Polymerisation of cumulene strands extruded through a fluorine-tipped
buckytube bundle is continuous, i.e. there is no energy-wasting cyclic
tool trajectory. The quality of the deposited polymer is hard to
predict without experimental data, but in theory its mechanical
properties might be not much lower than that of diamond or graphenes.

> heat dissipation is coming up with very efficient reaction
> steps. I'm not positive about this, but I think that may make
> the reaction probability go down, so the synthesis rate would
> be slower. So you can produce it "fast" if you can stand the
> heat or produce it "slow" if you are short on energy.

I respectfully disagree here. If you don't need full structural
control, we can speed things up quite a bit.



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:26:27 MST