Nanotecnologia y.. esperen que? Petroleo?

One of the radical application of the nanotechnoogy is in the help of a controversial energy font: the oil.

Nanotechnology could be used to enhance the possibilities of developing conventional and stranded gas resources and to improve the drilling process and oil and gas production by making it easier to separate oil and gas in the reservoir. Nanotechnology can make the oil and gas industry considerably greener. There are numerous areas in which nanotechnology can contribute to more-efficient, less-expensive, and more-environmentally sound technologies than those that are readily available. We identified the following possibilities of nanotechnology in the petroleum industry: 1-Nanotechnology-enhanced materials that provide strength to increase performance in drilling, tubular goods, and rotating parts. 2- Designer properties to enhance hydro-phobic to enhance materials for water flooding applications. 3- Nano-particulate wetting carried out using molecular dynamics 4- Lightweight materials that reduce weight requirements on offshore platforms 5- Nano-sensors for improved temperature and pressure ratings 6- New imaging and computational techniques to allow better discovery, sizing, and characterization of reservoirs.

And, b y personal knolowage, the most important useful nanotechology application on this topic is the ecoclean of the oil. Carbon nanotubes, which consist of atom-thick sheets of carbon rolled into cylinders, have captured scientific attention in recent decades because of their high strength, potential high conductivity and light weight. But producing nanotubes in bulk for specialized applications was often limited by difficulties in controlling the growth process as well as dispersing and sorting the produced nanotubes.

ORNL's Bobby Sumpter was part of a multi-institutional research team that set out to grow large clumps of nanotubes by selectively substituting boron atoms into the otherwise pure carbon lattice. Sumpter and Vincent Meunier, now of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, conducted simulations on supercomputers, including Jaguar at ORNL's Leadership Computing Facility, to understand how the addition of boron would affect the carbon nanotube structure.
"Any time you put a different atom inside the hexagonal carbon lattice, which is a chicken wire-like network, you disrupt that network because those atoms don't necessarily want to be part of the chicken wire structure," Sumpter said. "Boron has a different number of valence electrons, which results in curvature changes that trigger a different type of growth."
Simulations and lab experiments showed that the addition of boron atoms encouraged the formation of so-called "elbow" junctions that help the nanotubes grow into a 3-D network. The team's results are published in Nature Scientific Reports.
Fuente:
http://www.nanotech-now.com/news.cgi?story_id=45121
Islamic Azad University - Omidieh Branch, Omidieh, Iran