Self assembly
From apm
Important (and maybe non-obvious) fact:
Not all kinds of self assembly need diffusion driven by thermal motion to work.
There is:
- Thermally driven assembly (aka "brownian self assembly")
- Self assembly without thermal motion instead driven by longer range attraction forces.
E.g. like how magnets at the macroscale layed out in a row can do completely predictable self assembly with just one controlled nudge.
Self-assembly can be mixed with in various ways with positional assembly. Including:
Different kinds of self assembly in the foldamer printer concept
The foldamer printer concept where:
- Thermally driven assembly may be used to make the base vitamin parts that constitute that most basic building-blocks.
- The foldamer printer then performs some semi positional assembly of these basic building-blocks to larger composite blocks that
form hinge interlinked chains of blocks. - Non-thermal selfassembly may then finally self assemble the even bigger products block chains (that would diffuse only very slowly) to even bigger structures in a non thermally driven diffusionless way.