The editors at R&D present a lot of nanotech news on our website and in the R&D Daily. We also try to bring you some of the biggest headlines in industrial technology. But much of what we find in “news of the extremely” flows from pure research labs. If there’s nanomanufacturing to be seen, it’s typically being used as an added value process on top of conventional industrial processes. Component-to-OEM, if you will.
If the sci-tech advisory team to the president is to be believed, nanotechnology will soon come into its own as a proper manufacturing sector. This group presented a report last Friday reviewing the last 10 years of the National Nanotechnology Initiative, and the least controversial topics therein were the positive value of NNI, the growing importance of nanotech to manufacturing, and how industries are rapidly adapting to make use of new sub-100-nm materials and methods.
Instead, a glass half empty attitude prevailed during proceeding. To experts on hand, according to IEEE’s Dexter Johnson, the central issue of the day aside from domestic brain drain was the difficult task of measuring the actual economic value of nanotechnology. As has been learned the hard way, materials-based nanotech is much different than pharmaceutical products in that the value of a product using nanotechnology is not valued solely on the nanomaterials used. A plane is still a plane, with or without carbon fiber coatings, whereas a drug without the associated technology will likely have no value at all.
As a result, the true value of nanotech to industrial (and thus to investment) has been overblown in many ways, casting doubt onto the viability of some government-backed ventures, says Johnson, particularly in the dim light of recent venture capital performances in nanotech.
But with Russia and China investing heavily in nanomaterials research it’s a cinch that government backing for these areas of research will remain a priority. In fact, the 2011 NNI budget as proposed in February seems relatively cautious. That buzz about nanomanufacturing? It would result in an increase of about $26 million, or 34%, over 2009. But out of a budget of $1.7 billion that’s next to nothing. Much of it will be used at NIST to find ways to actually use some of these new materials to emerge from R&D. The agencies with perhaps the most interest in nanomanufacturing, the Dept. of Defense, would get a largely modest overall budget increase and refocus its efforts on deploying a variety of sensor, catalyst, and bio-based technologies that have been pioneered. The NSF, too, would some use its $32 million jump in 2011 to investigate new concepts in nanomanufacturing and complex nanosystems.
Where’s the rest of the funding growth? Agencies such as NSF, DOE, DOD and NIH still claim the lion’s share of the estimated $1.7 billion NNI budget, but it seems like EHS issues are capturing big attention, with agencies like the USDA, FDA, and EPA all getting a nod for large percentage increases for testing-related technologies.
It’s nice to see nanotech begin to have a broad appeal in R&D, but if nanomanufacturing really is going transform nanotechnology as we know it—and attract the sort of investors who want to back promising industries—then it’s going to need some convincing funding levels to see it through. For now, it appears, we still have a lot to learn about basic nanoscale phenomena.