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SEATTLE - The revolutionary promise of nanotechnology and microtechnology may never be realized until low cost, efficient manufacturing and fabrication techniques are applied to it, researchers said today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

To successfully bring the products of this science to large numbers of consumers, university and industry researchers must not only develop systems that work, but find ways to make them affordable.

The ability to span 10 orders of magnitude in size, from macromolecules and nanoparticles to overall device dimensions measured in meters - while still using low cost materials - is a daunting challenge unprecedented in industry, said Brian Paul, an associate professor of manufacturing and industrial engineering at Oregon State University.

"Cars were being built in the early 1900s before Henry Ford came along, but his assembly lines revolutionized their production and made them affordable for everyone," Paul said. "In more recent times Intel changed the world by creating the fabrication technology that enabled VLSI and integrated circuits.

"Low cost fabrication is still a challenge for multi-scale systems, but we're going to overcome this challenge, and in 25 years the world will be a better place."

Nanotechnology must be deployed through a microtechnology world, Paul said. Recent examples of this include research into nanoelectronics and nanoelectromechanical systems which build on their microtechnology predecessors. Micro energy and chemical systems, or MECS, are an important way to deploy nanotechnology, Paul said.

Paul today outlined some of the challenges in production of microtechnology devices, many of which may see their first applications in national security applications before they move on to a broader consumer audience.

"The soldier of the future is going to carry some remarkable technology that doesn't exist today, such as portable power generators for wearable electronics that run off of hydrocarbon fuels, or special protective suits that can provide personal cooling for up to eight hours, weighing only a couple kilograms," Paul said.

"They may have cytosensing technology that uses biological tissues to detect toxins. And all of this technology has to be lightweight and portable."

Laboratory experiments and prototypes are already indicating the feasibility of this technology, researchers say. They combine the accelerated heat and mass transfer that takes place in "microchannels" with new types of nanomaterials.

Examples include lightweight portable power generation, where low-wattage microchannel fuel combustors are combined with new superlattice-based thermal electric generator materials, to convert heat into electricity at perhaps five times the current efficiency.

Other possible products include miniature heat pumps that could run off the exhaust gases of automobiles to provide auto air conditioning; fuel reforming for hydrogen-powered automobiles; microreactors for converting Martian soil and atmosphere into rocket fuel; or waste remediators light and small enough that they could be used on-site, instead of hauling polluted materials to centralized incinerators. Individualized heat pumps for heating or cooling homes might increase efficiency and eliminate the need for costly ductwork. Continued advances in portable dialysis techniques could fuel radical innovations in health care.

But to get this technology out of the laboratory and into the field, Paul said, will take advances in material science, fabrication process development, and many other fields to create working, efficient systems at an affordable cost.

"Microlamination may be one approach to the low-cost development of many of these products," Paul said. "This involves the patterning and bonding of thin layers of materials to create larger microchannel arrays for implementing thermal and chemical unit operations."

There's a lot of work to do in developing the best materials and process combinations to simultaneously meet the wide range of the thermal and chemical properties, as well as cost targets.

Because of the large size of these systems, work has emphasized more traditional engineering materials, such as copper, stainless steel, titanium, polymers and some ceramics, Paul said. Silicon, the foundation of the modern electronics industry, may play a lesser role in the deployment of nanotechnology through MECS technology, because it lacks some of the physical properties, dimensions and material costs that are needed.

Future fabs for producing these multi-scale devices may actually resemble the systems now used in the manufacture of circuit boards, Paul said. Ink jet print heads are examples of current multi-scale systems that have been deployed. The next emerging applications include fuel conversion to hydrogen for fuel cells that run 10 times longer than electrochemical batteries of the same weight, he said, with distributed heat pumps close behind.

The products and processes necessary to deploy this technology are sufficiently complex, he said, that interdisciplinary teams involving multiple institutions will be necessary. Current efforts in the Pacific Northwest include the establishment of the Oregon Signature Research Center for Multi-Scale Materials and Devices, involving participation from OSU, the University of Oregon, Portland State University and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratories.

Work in these fields should be spurred by the recent passage of the 21st Century Nanotechnology Research and Development Act, which was sponsored by Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden. That initiative will provide $3.7 billion for nanotechnology research and education beginning in 2005.