Tag Archives: Dresden University of Technology

Update on the International NanoCar race coming up in Autumn 2016

First off, the race seems to be adjusting its brand (it was billed as the International NanoCar Race in my Dec. 21, 2015 posting), from a May 20, 2016 news item on Nanowerk,

The first-ever international race of molecule-cars (Nanocar Race) will take place at the CEMES laboratory in Toulouse this fall [2016].

A May 9, 2016 notice on France’s Centre national de la recherce scientifique’s (CNRS) news website, which originated the news item, fills in a few more details,

Five teams are fine-tuning their cars—each made up of around a hundred atoms and measuring a few nanometers in length. They will be propelled by an electric current on a gold atom “race track.” We take you behind the scenes to see how these researcher-racers are preparing for the NanoCar Race.

About this video

Original title: The NanoCar Race

Production year: 2016

Length: 6 min 23

Director: Pierre de Parscau

Producer: CNRS Images

Speaker(s) :

Christian Joachim
Centre d’Elaboration des Matériaux et d’Etudes Structurales

Gwénaël Rapenne
(CEMES/CNRS)

Corentin Durand
(CEMES/CNRS)

Pierre Abeilhou
(CEMES/CNRS)

Frank Eisenhut
Technical University of Dresden

You can find the video which is embedded in both the Nanowerk news item and here with the CNRS notice.

International NanoCar race: 1st ever to be held in Autumn 2016

They have a very intriguing set of rules for the 1st ever International NanoCar Race to be held in Toulouse, France in October 2016. From the Centre d’Élaboration de Matériaux et d’Études Structurales (CEMES) Molecule-car Race International page (Note: A link has been removed),

1) General regulations

The molecule-car of a registered team has at its disposal a runway prepared on a small portion of the (111) face of the same crystalline gold surface. The surface is maintained at a very low temperature that is 5 Kelvin = – 268°C (LT) in ultra-high vacuum that is 10-8 Pa or 10-10 mbar 10-10 Torr (UHV) for at least the duration of the competition. The race itself last no more than 2 days and 2 nights including the construction time needed to build up atom by atom the same identical runway for each competitor. The construction and the imaging of a given runway are obtained by a low temperature scanning tunneling microscope (LT-UHV-STM) and certified by independent Track Commissioners before the starting of the race itself.

On this gold surface and per competitor, one runway is constructed atom by atom using a few surface gold metal ad-atoms. A molecule-car has to circulate around those ad-atoms, from the starting to the arrival lines, each line being delimited by 2 gold ad-atoms. The spacing between two metal ad-atoms along a runway is less than 4 nm. A minimum of 5 gold ad-atoms line has to be constructed per team and per runway.

The organizers have included an example of a runway,

A preliminary runway constructed by C. Manzano and We Hyo Soe (A*Star, IMRE) in Singapore, with the 2 starting gold ad-atoms, the 5 gold ad-atoms for the track and the 2 gold ad-atoms had been already constructed atom by atom.

A preliminary runway constructed by C. Manzano and We Hyo Soe (A*Star, IMRE) in Singapore, with the 2 starting gold ad-atoms, the 5 gold ad-atoms for the track and the 2 gold ad-atoms had been already constructed atom by atom.

A November 25, 2015 [France] Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) press release notes that five teams presented prototypes at the Futurapolis 2015 event preparatory to the upcoming Autumn 2016 race,

The French southwestern town of Toulouse is preparing for the first-ever international race of molecule-cars: five teams will present their car prototype during the Futurapolis event on November 27, 2015. These cars, which only measure a few nanometers in length and are propelled by an electric current, are scheduled to compete on a gold atom surface next year. Participants will be able to synthesize and test their molecule-car until October 2016 prior to taking part in the NanoCar Race organized at the CNRS Centre d’élaboration des matériaux et d’études structurales (CEMES) by Christian Joachim, senior researcher at the CNRS and Gwénaël Rapenne, professor at Université Toulouse III-Paul Sabatier, with the support of the CNRS.

There is a video describing the upcoming 2016 race (English, spoken and in subtitles),


NanoCar Race, the first-ever race of molecule-cars by CNRS-en

A Dec. 14, 2015 Rice University news release provides more detail about the event and Rice’s participation,

Rice University will send an entry to the first international NanoCar Race, which will be held next October at Pico-Lab CEMES-CNRS in Toulouse, France.

Nobody will see this miniature grand prix, at least not directly. But cars from five teams, including a collaborative effort by the Rice lab of chemist James Tour and scientists at the University of Graz, Austria, will be viewable through sophisticated microscopes developed for the event.

Time trials will determine which nanocar is the fastest, though there may be head-to-head races with up to four cars on the track at once, according to organizers.

A nanocar is a single-molecule vehicle of 100 or so atoms that incorporates a chassis, axles and freely rotating wheels. Each of the entries will be propelled across a custom-built gold surface by an electric current supplied by the tip of a scanning electron microscope. The track will be cold at 5 kelvins (minus 450 degrees Fahrenheit) and in a vacuum.

Rice’s entry will be a new model and the latest in a line that began when Tour and his team built the world’s first nanocar more than 10 years ago.

“It’s challenging because, first of all, we have to design a car that can be manipulated on that specific surface,” Tour said. “Then we have to figure out the driving techniques that are appropriate for that car. But we’ll be ready.”

Victor Garcia, a graduate student at Rice, is building what Tour called his group’s Model 1, which will be driven by members of Professor Leonhard Grill’s group at Graz. The labs are collaborating to optimize the design.

The races are being organized by the Center for Materials Elaboration and Structural Studies (CEMES) of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).

The race was first proposed in a 2013 ACS Nano paper by Christian Joachim, a senior researcher at CNRS, and Gwénaël Rapenne, a professor at Paul Sabatier University.

Joining Rice are teams from Ohio University; Dresden University of Technology; the National Institute for Materials Science, Tsukuba, Japan; and Paul Sabatier [Université Toulouse III-Paul Sabatier].

I believe there’s still time to register an entry (from the Molecule-car Race International page; Note: Links have been removed),

To register for the first edition of the molecule-car Grand Prix in Toulouse, a team has to deliver to the organizers well before March 2016:

  • The detail of its institution (Academic, public, private)
  • The design of its molecule-vehicle including the delivery of the xyz file coordinates of the atomic structure of its molecule-car
  • The propulsion mode, preferably by tunneling inelastic effects
  • The evaporation conditions of the molecule-vehicles
  • If possible a first UHV-STM image of the molecule-vehicle
  • The name and nationality of the LT-UHV-STM driver

Those information are used by the organizers for selecting the teams and for organizing training sessions for the accepted teams in a way to optimize their molecule-car design and to learn the driving conditions on the LT-Nanoprobe instrument in Toulouse. Then, the organizers will deliver an official invitation letter for a given team to have the right to experiment on the Toulouse LT-Nanoprobe instrument with their own drivers. A detail training calendar will be determined starting September 2015.

The NanoCar Race website’s homepage notes that it will be possible to view the race in some fashion,

The NanoCar Race is a race where molecular machines compete on a nano-sized track. A NanoCar is a single molecule-car that has wheels and a chassis… and is propelled by a small electric shock.

The race will be invisible to the naked eye: a unique microscope based in Toulouse, France, will make it possible to watch the competition.

The NanoCar race is mostly a fantastic human and scientific adventure that will be broadcast worldwide. [emphasis mine]

Good luck to all the competitors.

The relationship between Valyrian steel (from Game of Thrones), Damascus steel, and nuclear nanotechnology

There’s a very interesting June 20, 2014 posting by Charles Day on his Dayside blog (located on the Physics Today website). Day manages to relate the Game of Thrones tv series to nuclear power and nanotechnology,

The military technology of A Song of Ice and Fire, George R. R. Martin’s series of fantasy novels, is medieval with an admixture of the supernatural. Dragons aside, among the most prized weapons are swords made from Valyrian steel, which are lighter, stronger, and sharper than ordinary steel swords.

Like many of the features in the rich world of the novels and their TV adaptation, Game of Thrones, Valyrian steel has a historical inspiration. Sometime before 300 BC, metalworkers in Southern India discovered a way to make small cakes of high-carbon steel known as wootz. Thanks to black wavy bands of Fe3C particles that pervade the metal, wootz steel was already strong. …

Perhaps because the properties of wootz and Damascus steels depended, in part, on a particular kind of iron ore, the ability of metallurgists to make the alloys was lost sometime in the 18th century. In A Song of Ice and Fire, the plot plays out during an era in which making Valyrian steel is a long-lost art.

Martin’s knowledge of metallurgy is perhaps shaky. …

Interestingly, the comments on the blog posting largely concern themselves with whether George RR Martin knows anything about metallurgy. The consensus being that he does and that the problems in the Game of Thrones version of metallurgy lie with the series writers.

I first came across the Damascus steel, wootz, and carbon nanotube story in 2008 and provided a concise description on my Nanotech Mysteries wiki Middle Ages page,

Damascus steel blades were first made in the 8th century CE when they acquired a legendary status as unlike other blades they were able to cut through bone and stone while remaining sharp enough to cut a piece of silk. They were also flexible which meant they didn’t break off easily in a sword fight. The secret for making the blades died (history does not record how) about 1700 CE and there hasn’t been a new blade since.

 The blades were generally made from metal ingots prepared in India using special recipes which probably put just the right amount of carbon and other impurities into the iron. By following these recipes and following specific forging techniques craftsmen ended up making nanotubes … When these blades were nearly finished, blacksmiths would etch them with acid. This brought out the wavy light and dark lines that make Damascus swords easy to recognize.3

 It turns out part of the secret to the blade is nanotechnology. Scientists discovered this by looking at a Damascus steel blade from 1700 under an electron microscope. It seems those unknown smiths were somehow encasing cementite nanowires in carbon nanotubes then forging them into the steel blades giving them their legendary strength and flexibility.

The reference information I used then seems to be no longer available online but there is this more than acceptable alternative, a Sept. 27, 2008 postiing by Ed Yong from his Not Exactly Rocket Science blog (on ScienceBlogs.com; Note: A link has been removed),

In medieval times, crusading Christian knights cut a swathe through the Middle East in an attempt to reclaim Jerusalem from the Muslims. The Muslims in turn cut through the invaders using a very special type of sword, which quickly gained a mythical reputation among the Europeans. These ‘Damascus blades‘ were extraordinarily strong, but still flexible enough to bend from hilt to tip. And they were reputedly so sharp that they could cleave a silk scarf floating to the ground, just as readily as a knight’s body.

They were superlative weapons that gave the Muslims a great advantage, and their blacksmiths carefully guarded the secret to their manufacture. The secret eventually died out in the eighteenth century and no European smith was able to fully reproduce their method.

Two years ago, Marianne Reibold and colleagues from the University of Dresden uncovered the extraordinary secret of Damascus steel – carbon nanotubes. The smiths of old were inadvertently using nanotechnology.

Getting back to Day, he goes on to explain the Damascus/Valyrian steel connection to nuclear power (Note: Links have been removed),

Valyrian and Damascus steels were on my mind earlier this week when I attended a session at TechConnect World on the use of nanotechnology in the nuclear power industry.

Scott Anderson of Lockheed Martin gave the introductory talk. Before the Fukushima disaster, Anderson pointed out, the principal materials science challenge in the nuclear industry lay in extending the lifetime of fuel rods. Now the focus has shifted to accident-tolerant fuels and safer, more durable equipment.

Among the other speakers was MIT’s Ju Li, who described his group’s experiments with incorporating carbon nanotubes (CNTs) in aluminum to boost the metal’s resistance to radiation damage. In a reactor core, neutrons and other ionizing particles penetrate vessels, walls, and other structures, where they knock atoms off lattice sites. The cumulative effect of those displacements is to create voids and other defects that weaken the structures.

Li isn’t sure yet how the CNTs resist irradiation and toughen the aluminum, but at the end of his talk he recalled their appearance in another metal, steel.

In 2006 Peter Paufler of Dresden University of Technology and his collaborators used high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (TEM) to examine the physical and chemical microstructure of a sample of Damascus steel from the 17th century.

The saber from which the sample was taken was forged in Isfahan, Persia, by the famed blacksmith Assad Ullah. As part of their experiment, Paufler and his colleagues washed the sample in hydrochloric acid to remove Fe3C particles. A second look with TEM revealed the presence of CNTs.

There’s still active interest in researching Damascus steel blades as not all the secrets behind the blade’s extraordinary qualities have been revealed yet. There is a March 13, 2014 posting here which describes a research project where Chinese researchers are attempting (using computational software) to uncover the reason for the blade’s unique patterns,

It seems that while researchers were able to answer some questions about the blade’s qualities, researchers in China believe they may have answered the question about the blade’s unique patterns, from a March 12, 2014 news release on EurekAlert,

Blacksmiths and metallurgists in the West have been puzzled for centuries as to how the unique patterns on the famous Damascus steel blades were formed. Different mechanisms for the formation of the patterns and many methods for making the swords have been suggested and attempted, but none has produced blades with patterns matching those of the Damascus swords in the museums. The debate over the mechanism of formation of the Damascus patterns is still ongoing today. Using modern metallurgical computational software (Thermo-Calc, Stockholm, Sweden), Professor Haiwen Luo of the Central Iron and Steel Research Institute in Beijing, together with his collaborator, have analyzed the relevant published data relevant to the Damascus blades, and present a new explanation that is different from other proposed mechanisms.

At the time the researchers were hoping to have someone donate a piece of genuine Damascus steel blade. From my March 13, 2014 posting,

Note from the authors: It would be much appreciated if anyone would like to donate a piece of genuine Damascus blade for our research.

Corresponding Author:

LUO Haiwen
Email: haiwenluo@126.com

Perhaps researchers will manage to solve the puzzle of how medieval craftsman were once able to create extraordinary steel blades.