Nanoscale transport system design will benefit from a cost saving innovation, claim researchers in the US and Japan.

Henry Hess and colleagues at the University of Florida, US, and Gifu University, Japan, have designed a computer simulation tool that predicts the behaviour of nanoscale chemical reactors. 

Hess' tool allows the design of a reactor device to be tested before it is built, ensuring it will operate as required. According to Hess, before this innovation 'every design had to be laboriously and costly implemented and its performance analysed.' 

The devices transport reagent molecules to reaction sites using shuttles that run along surface tracks. The shuttles are powered by so-called motor proteins like kinesin. The tracks cause different molecules to flow through them along designated paths and are linked together into complex arrangements by various components. 

 

Hess turned his knowledge of how components such as junctions work into a computer model that predicts flow paths through devices. By modelling already built devices, the results could be compared to how they actually operate in practice. The results of several simulations not only reproduced Hess' own data, but also the results of other researchers. 

Hess is 'tremendously excited' by this development, adding that his tool 'facilitates the design of individual guiding [components] as well as whole networks.' According to Hess, this method could be adapted to the simulation of other nanoscale transport systems.  

David Parker