Molecular engineering is an emerging field of study concerned with the design and testing of molecular properties, behavior and interactions in order to assemble better materials, systems, and processes for specific functions. This approach, in which observable properties of a macroscopic system are influenced by direct alteration of a molecular structure, falls into the broader category of “bottom-up” design.
Molecular engineering is highly interdisciplinary by nature, encompassing aspects of chemical engineering, materials science, bioengineering, electrical engineering, physics, mechanical engineering, and chemistry. There is also considerable overlap with nanotechnology, in that both are concerned with the behavior of materials on the scale of nanometers or smaller. Given the highly fundamental nature of molecular interactions, there are a plethora of potential application areas, limited perhaps only by one's imagination and the laws of physics. However, some of the early successes of molecular engineering have come in the fields of immunotherapy, synthetic biology, and printable electronics (see molecular engineering applications).
Molecular engineering is a dynamic and evolving field with complex target problems; breakthroughs require sophisticated and creative engineers who are conversant across disciplines. A rational engineering methodology that is based on molecular principles is in contrast to the widespread trial-and-error approaches common throughout engineering disciplines. Rather than relying on well-described but poorly-understood empirical correlations between the makeup of a system and its properties, a molecular design approach seeks to manipulate system properties directly using an understanding of their chemical and physical origins. This often gives rise to fundamentally new materials and systems, which are required to address outstanding needs in numerous fields, from energy to healthcare to electronics.
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Students are given the means to dig effectively into modern scientific literature in the multidisciplinary field of bioengineering.
The method relies on granting sufficient time to become familiar wi
This course consists of an introduction to biology and more particularly to biology as a multidisciplinary field, emphasizing
natural examples of materials engineering. It should therefore allow engin
The course introduces the main classes of biomaterials used in the biomedical field. The interactions with biological environment are discussed and challenges highlighted. State of the art examples pe
A nanoparticle or ultrafine particle is usually defined as a particle of matter that is between 1 and 100 nanometres (nm) in diameter. The term is sometimes used for larger particles, up to 500 nm, or fibers and tubes that are less than 100 nm in only two directions. At the lowest range, metal particles smaller than 1 nm are usually called atom clusters instead.
Molecular dynamics (MD) is a computer simulation method for analyzing the physical movements of atoms and molecules. The atoms and molecules are allowed to interact for a fixed period of time, giving a view of the dynamic "evolution" of the system. In the most common version, the trajectories of atoms and molecules are determined by numerically solving Newton's equations of motion for a system of interacting particles, where forces between the particles and their potential energies are often calculated using interatomic potentials or molecular mechanical force fields.
Nanotechnology, often shortened to nanotech, is the use of matter on atomic, molecular, and supramolecular scales for industrial purposes. The earliest, widespread description of nanotechnology referred to the particular technological goal of precisely manipulating atoms and molecules for fabrication of macroscale products, also now referred to as molecular nanotechnology. A more generalized description of nanotechnology was subsequently established by the National Nanotechnology Initiative, which defined nanotechnology as the manipulation of matter with at least one dimension sized from 1 to 100 nanometers (nm).
Pt(II)-based molecular catalysts stand as a prototypical system in hydrogen evolution reactions (HER) owing to their consistently elevated activity levels. Their integration into heterogeneous systems thus provides an ideal platform to develop catalytic ma ...
Wiley-V C H Verlag Gmbh2024
Statistical (machine-learning, ML) models are more and more often used in computational chemistry as a substitute to more expensive ab initio and parametrizable methods. While the ML algorithms are capable of learning physical laws implicitly from data, ad ...
EPFL2024
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Emulsions are omnipresent in our everyday life; for example, in food, certain drug and cosmetic formulations, agriculture, and as paints. Moreover, they are frequently used to perform high-throughput screening assays with minimum sample volumes. Key to the ...