Seamless covalent welding
Many macroscopic structures like water pipes, streets, ... can't be created as a whole by a single nanofactory. Still they should be assembled makro-robotically in a high up convergent assembly layer when there's highly repetitive work. The possibility for direct physical manipulation by human hands (assembly/disassembly) instead of a necessary detour over a virtual model is desirable for initial designs or artistic work or other reasons.
High level surface interfaces allowing such action (= capable of quasi welding) must account for the much lower human positioning accuracy and the dirty environment. They must recognize the partner surface capture it at some spot (probing on command) align it correctly and expel all of the dirt the surfaces have accumulated.
related with: recycling
- mergement of machine phases
Existence of surface passivations that can preventing welding
For some if not many or even most gemstone like compounds (especially strongly ionic ones and rather metallic ones) a highly stable surface passivation (like present in hydrogen terminated diamond surfaces) may not be possible.
In the worst case all the attempted surface passivations would diffuse around at room temperature.
In the better case when diffusion does not happen but the passivation is still weak, then when the combination of surface to surface compression and temperature gets over some critical level thermo-chemo-mechanically driven rearrangement processes (surface reconstruction of one or both of the each other facing surfaces) may happen. E.g. the surfaces may somehow shove the passivation away to the "side" into more or less defined interstitial positions leading to a probably undesired (weak) weld.
Leaving the surface passivation out to begin with one has fully non-passivated surfaces that will "bond on contact" always forming seamless covalent welds on contact. Right?
(TODO: Investigate whether in ionic compounds motion restraints can be used to force same charges to face each other, such that welding is prevented. Preventing approaching motion seems simple, but what about allowing sliding motion?)
Difficulties in surface passivation may restrict the usage of many materials to only:
- non-mechanical functions e.g. electronical and optical
- structural functions (no sliding bearing surfaces)
- background filling functions (right behind surface bearing surfaces) - considering a thick shell not a surface passivation
Consequences of the "most materials are difficult to prevent from welding together at the nanoscale" issue on recycling:
Finding a well passivatable material that does degrade would be highly desirable because:
Diamond (the fist gemstone like material where strong surface passivation was known to be possible) does not really degrade when left alone as waste in nature (escaping the recycling process), filling the background behind sliding interfaces with degradable material is a bad idea. If that background is eroded away left over are persistent nanoscale diamond "skin flakes" that are likely very damaging to the environment (food chain). Even a solid non-degradable block of diamond would be better than that.
(TODO: Investigate how well hydrogen passivation on silicon does. On quartz (SiO2) what one naturally observes is -OH passivation (at a sparse spacing since quartz with its -o- bridges between Si atoms forms big loops thus has big voids). Probably not very suitable for sliding interfaces.)
Notes
- (wiki-TODO: add existing illustrative graphic of opposing surfaces with open bonds matching up)
Related
- Not to confuse with: Macroscale active align-and-fuse connectors
- Connection method
- Surface passivation
