Green Nanotechnology

Dr. S Ahmad

Conventional chemistry based synthesis of modern materials has been causing great concern regarding ensuing environmental pollutions, creating human health hazards and ultimately questioning the sustainability of raw materials, processes and products derived there from.These concerns have led to the emergence of ‘Green Chemistry’ where a number of related issues are addressed to for making the process of material synthesis more environmentally benign, less polluting, minimizing the wastes, conserving ecological balances and mitigating problems that crop up while providing continuous support for improving the quality of human lives.

With recent development in Nanoscience, it is now becoming possible to design physical, chemical and biological properties of nanomaterials by going through an exercise of 1st principle based computer simulations to correlate their properties in terms of shape, size and structures of the nanosize building blocks used. Further, it has been noted that functionalization of nanosize building blocks can be used in numerous ways to make chemical conjugations of inorganic nano species with a large variety of bio-molecules of living organisms. Thus, it is now becoming possible to utilise the bio-mimetic processes to synthesise newer classes of nanomaterials which are more biocompatible and benign in nature than the present lot.

‘Green Chemistry’ is going to be progressively implemented by incorporating the latest findings of Nanoscience and Technology with engineering solutions of the problems combined with innovative ideas derived from the natural processes. Some current results reported in this context will be presented during this talk. The questions related to the hazardous aspects of nanomaterials will be addressed to by considering practical cases from the industry using Green Chemistry concepts from the other end. An attempt will be made to show that sufficient control on nanomaterial properties derived from Nanoscience and Technology based methods combined with the concept of Green Chemistry to preserve ecological balance is going to provide Green Manufacturing of tomorrow.