NanoCAD design interface
Overview
Computer aided design (CAD) tools, in their capability of representing geometry efficiently, play an essential part of all design and manufacturing activities nowadays. Numerous CAD tools exist for designing nano scale structures. However, these tools are developed following the mind set of conventional CAD tools, which are designed to manage relatively small number of components, typically ranging from one to a few thousand. Furthermore, in the conventional macro-scale design, users generally design and interact with one unique shape at a time. However, as shown below, it is commonly seen that many identical elements, such as atoms and molecules, cluster into a larger structure with specific functionality in the nano scale regime. To duplicate and manage such clustering behavior efficiently, our investigation suggests a novel geometry representation and manipulation scheme be required to study as well as design structures consisting of hundreds of thousands of geometric elements. To further facilitate the design work of structures of such nature in the nano scale regime, RPL NanoCAD, an integration framework for multiphysics modeling, has been proposed and developed.
Example 1: NanoCAD will facilitate the generation and manipulation of large clusters like bilipid layers.
Figure 1. (a) Single lipid element, and (b) lipids cluster into larger membrane structures.
Example 2: NanoCAD will provide easy access to different levels of details of a design, from the basic elements (actins) to their aggregate structures (sensor posts).
Figure 2. (a) Single actin, (b) same type of actins, each with a different orientation, assemble into a linear segment, and (c) such segment forms the post structure of a sensor device.