Nanotechnology Project

by Ryan D. Murray

 

KINGSTON – Nanotechnology is a new and emerging field. One of the first nanotechnology courses offered at URI is being taught this spring.

 

Nanotechnology is the manipulation of matter on an atomic, molecular, and supramolecular scale.

 

Shane Fairbrother, a mechanical engineering major, is taking a 3-credit Nano Tools course. This course is a hands-on introduction to nanotechnology, which uses state-of-the-art instrumentation within the field.

 

In this course, the students have to complete a project relevant to the field of nanotechnology. In one of the projects, Fairbrother and other students have to examine how nanoparticles respond to traveling through blood and then into water. To do that, the students have to create solutions that mimic these conditions, and then test the nanoparticles with tools they became familiar with in the course.

 

“What happens when they move through the blood is that the nanoparticles, they’ve got electrical forces working on the surface that attract one another along with proteins and salt in the blood,” Fairbrother says. “So what can happen is that through that electrical attraction, they can start to stick together, that’s what we’re testing in our project to see how much they stick together. Because that can lead to bad things if they start getting much bigger.

 

”Nanotechnology is important to Fairbrother because scientists can work with things on a really small level and its opening doors to innovation in a lot of fields.

 

“One example is medicine, being able to give drugs to people in areas that we haven’t been able to reach before is a new advancement,” Fairbrother says.

 

In his current project, Fairbrother is using an ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy (UV/Vis). This tool looks at individual particles and shines a light on them to see what wavelength of light they absorb. By seeing how many of them absorb this specific wavelength, scientists can determine the concentration of the particles that have remained single as oppose to sticking together.

 

A lot of nanoparticles are in use in the United States today, including sunscreen, clothing, food-packaging and bandages.