Self assembly
From apm
Self assembly is NOT synonymous to thermally driven assembly!!
Nonthermal self assembly is a form of selfassembly that is not thermally driven.
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 in various ways be mixed 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.
Related
- Squigglesembly – filling almost arbitrary volumes by tracing out a squiggly hilbert curve like path
not to confuse with the squiggly line in structural DNA nanotechnology which is one-pot self-assembly. - Circumsembly – circumnavigating irreversible errors
Some errors might be tolerable in the final product especially when
they are internal or on a non-interface surface and not distort/disrupt the entire structure too much. - Hinged blockchain self folding – not thermally driven form of selfassembly
Two important measures of progress: