What is Rational Nanotechnology?

If you add the principals of rational design to the field of nanotechnology, what do you get? Rational Nanotechnology! In a recent paper about the way nanotechnology is going to develop over the next few decades, The Chemical Industry Vision2020 Technology Partnership’s R&D Roadmap coined the phrase 'nanomaterials by design', defining it as:

..the ability to employ scientific principals in deliberately creating structures with nanoscale features (e.g., size, architecture) that deliver unique functionality and utility for target applications.

Rational nanotechnology takes all of the precision and rationality of rational design, but applies that at the level of atoms and molecules rather than car parts and factory machinery. The ultimate goal is to engineer and manufacture materials to exact specifications at the molecular level, to carefully select desired properties for materials, and then to efficiently manufacture them.

By necessity, this process will involve computers to visualize what is going on at the nanoscale and make predictions about the properties of new materials. It would be impossible to work with anything at the nanoscale without techniques to observe, and computational software to interpret what you had produced. In addition to that, many of the novel properties and unusual phenomenon that occur at the nanoscale are too complex to predict without the aid of computation. As the modeling and simulation tools continue to improve, researchers can say with more conviction that they understand the basics of matter at this scale, can manipulate it, can predict what it will do — and can therefore get closer to literally designing novel materials and devices from the atom up.

And when you add rational design, nanotechnology and computing together, you get Computer-aided Nanodesign.