New technologies: R&D and mutual intermingling

Intro.

Nanotechnology, energy efficiency techniques, and blockchain are just a few of the technologies that the entire world is investing large amounts of capital in R&D.

Companies like 4ward360 certainly have their own main product development line; however, this is not limiting from the point of view of applications of the aforementioned product to technologies that can coexist and/or even improve the product itself.

Nanotechnology is the specific case in which Dr. Sabrina Zuccalà pushed her company, studying its applications to parallel technologies and ecosystems.

Nanotechnology and energy efficiency: what is the connection?

Energy efficiency is the set of technologies aimed at maximizing the ratio between energy used and energy input into a given system. Several technologies employed in the field of energy efficiency are made up of nanoscale elements, such as the constituent elements of some sensors or some materials for thermal insulation or some types of glass coating.

How do nanotechnologies improve the end user’s life, and what are the advantages of using nanotechnologies in construction?

The European Commission considers nanotechnology as one of the six enabling technologies, i.e., a technology through which processes can be realized or products developed for multiple applications. However, it must also be said that nanotechnology is currently the result of what is called the knowledge economy, and therefore its use is often included in high-tech industrial contexts where the products or processes developed and commercialized can economically support the added value contributed by nanotechnology.

In the construction sector, where the main objective is often cost optimization, it is very rare for nanotechnology to be recognized in terms of the selling price of the product, and it is therefore very difficult to see the added value contributed by nanotechnology. Therefore, nanomaterials at the base or as additives of construction products are already on the market, guaranteeing excellent thermal-hygrometric or aesthetic performance of the building envelope, but their still significantly higher cost compared to other materials with lower performance prevents mass use.

Another example can be referred to third-generation photovoltaic cells developed thanks to nanotechnology and that could be used as semi-transparent photovoltaic glass. We could produce electricity from windows to power various domestic utilities or, if made on plastic and flexible supports, they could be applied to the external casing of mobile electronic devices, recharging their power batteries.

The increase in the energy efficiency of such devices involves the development of new photovoltaic strategies, “our calculations show the possibility of exploiting the interaction between nanostructured silicon elements to develop new photovoltaic devices, we have simulated systems consisting of silicon nanocrystals placed together at distances smaller than a nanometer. The results show that the quantum nature of interactions has the overall effect of increasing the number of charges generated per single absorbed photon and therefore improving the performance of the solar device”.

4Ward360 invests a significant portion of its revenue in Research & Development, and can now boast countless patents studied and tailor-made products to offer new and ever-better performances to material surfaces (this is also thanks to the continuous stimulus provided by specific requests made by clients based on their needs). For my business, I have received many awards, including recently the International Excellence Award for Merit from the Italian Republic: these are great satisfactions.

Nanotechnologies applied to blockchain: a simple “cultural exchange” or an “economic-technological maximization of their respective strengths”?

Nanotechnology and blockchain are currently evolving as parallel technologies. These two worlds are destined to intertwine in the near future, as they possess complementary elements that allow one to maximize the benefits of the other.

For example, the market for counterfeit goods is a problem on which new-generation technologies can converge their efforts.

In a report released in June 2020, the EUIPO (European Union Intellectual Property Office) estimated a drop in sales due to counterfeiting in 11 sectors in the EU (directly in the industries analyzed and also along the related supply chain).

• These losses exceeded a total of 83 billion EUR per year in the period 2013-2017.
• More than 671,000 jobs were lost in legal activities and 15 billion EUR per year in tax revenues in the Member States. Source EUIPO

That said, let’s consider two key aspects related to the product, which can be introduced by the commingling of parallel technologies: the “signature” of the product’s originality (and/or the product’s possessor) and the history of the “life” of that non-counterfeit product.

When nanotechnology provides a unique “signature” on the product itself (fabric, metal, various materials), through specific techniques, the product can then be scanned (for example, through a portable scanner or an app on a smartphone), creating a sort of digital representation that can be stored on a corresponding blockchain platform: a process like this could generate a tamper-proof system.

The blockchain platform itself would track the product: the result would bring visibility to all participants in the chain, from the product supply chain to the human chain related to customer ownership transfers.

All of this, of course, managing the immutable saving of digital identities of individual customers, but also and above all of the products themselves: this would not only generate an overall chain of the original product, but would also allow for better management of parallel aspects such as receipts, turning them into digital ones.

Products would, therefore, even have their own digital identity, opening up new scenarios for IoT technology, another “twin” of nanotechnology and blockchain.

Being able to demonstrate the authenticity of the product with a commingling of these types of technologies would certainly lead to further investigations: it would generate security not only for the manufacturer but also for the seller and the end customer, thus providing new oxygen to a market increasingly suffocated by tampering and fakes that even affect jobs.