Nanoscale Intelligent Materials and Structures

Since the time of the design of the lever and wheel, it has been a goal of mankind to improve the performance of engineered systems. To achieve large advances in the performance of current systems — starting from the simplest machine elements to automobiles, bridges, buildings, aircraft, helicopters, wind turbines, environmental monitoring systems, national security systems, and surgical and medical devices — will probably require that these systems become intelligent. Intelligent systems and machines will be autonomous, self-sensing, able to resist vibration, redistribute loads, and change shape in response to their environmental conditions, and therefore preserve their integrity, increase their lifetimes, optimize their performance, reduce the cost of ownership, and provide continuous safety during use. The critical ingredient needed to make structures and machines intelligent is intelligent materials. The problem is that current intelligent materials have limited capabilities and new classes of practical and enabling intelligent materials with vastly improved properties are needed. This chapter therefore tackles the problem of designing new intelligent materials and takes the approach of using nanoscale components and developing processes to build intelligent materials from the bottom up.