From: Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Date: Mon Jul 19 1999 - 07:53:56 MDT
Over the past few months, I've been trying to see if anyone has come up with
the idea of a passive nanofilter. Admittedly, I've only been looking on
what has been accessible via the web. I haven't found anything on the
subject. So, I offer my speculation here on it in hopes others will be able
to use the idea. (If it is original, I would mind a bit of credit should
anything come of it, though not being an engineer, I don't imagine myself
actually designing or producing it.:)
What is a passive nanofilter? It is a device which filters particles based
on electrostatic properties at the nanometer scale. How could this be done?
It could do this through use of it's configuration and composition. I
imagine a membrane with pores whereing the pores might be surrounded with
atoms of certain types and with a certain geometry all imbedded in some sort
of structure. There are no moving parts per se -- hence the "passive."
What could this be used for? Separation of materials obviously, including
filtering water to greater degrees of purity, removing chemicals from other
liquids or gases, or separating a mixture of several substances into various
caches of near pure substances.
Such a filter might not be able to work with raw materials, such as
seawater, given that it might become clogged easily, but it might work with
materials that have already gone through a preliminary filtering by some
other devices.
To my mind, it might be easier to create this machine since it only involves
placing some atoms in a substrate -- as opposed to create a nanomachine or a
self-replicator. However, despite its simplicity, it might be a milestone
on the way to creating other nanodevices, especially nanomachines, as it
would be able to provide purer sets of building blocks than current methods.
Any thoughts on this?
Cheers!
Daniel Ust
http://mars.superlink.net/neptune/
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