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Materials, nanotechnology and advanced manufacturing
Materials and how they are made: nanomaterials and their uses in health, smart and advanced materials, composites, technical textiles, and 3D printing. Prelims has asked about nanotechnology in health, the uses of geotextiles and the applications of 3D printing.
UPSC has asked
- Prelims 2018: applications of 3D printing
- Prelims 2015: nanotechnology in health, targeted drug delivery and gene therapy
4 Aug 2026 · Prelims
Lab grown diamonds
Natural mines are depleting, and a stone grown in a reactor is the same substance rather than an imitation of it. What separates the two is therefore not quality but provenance, which is where the trade argument sits.
- High Pressure, High Temperature (HPHT) synthesis mimics conditions in the Earth's mantle.
- Chemical Vapour Deposition (CVD) deposits carbon from a gas onto a diamond seed.
- The grown stone is cheaper than a mined one and easier to trace.
- Conflict diamonds still evade the Kimberley Process, which is part of the case made for the grown stone.
- India is investing in its own production and research.
The Hindu, 4 Aug 2026: Lab-grown diamonds as an alternative to mined stones (opens in a new tab)
7 Sep 2026 · Prelims
Jute geotextiles
Jute's oldest market is sacking and its newest is civil engineering, where a geotextile woven from it is laid into the ground rather than over it. A fabric holding a slope until vegetation roots need not outlast the plants, so here biodegradability is the point rather than a defect.
- Jute geotextile protects embankment and riverbank slopes, aids vegetation on degraded land and goes under road and railway formations.
- The fibre comes from Corchorus capsularis, white jute, and Corchorus olitorius, tossa jute.
UPSC has asked
- Prelims 2020: geotextiles in environmentally sustainable rural roads
14 Sep 2026 · Prelims
Thallium copper selenide
A thermoelectric material turns a temperature difference straight into electricity, so a hot flue beside cool air is already a generator. The difficulty is that it must conduct electricity well while conducting heat poorly, which is why the search is for crystals whose lattice carries heat badly.
- The Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), an autonomous institute of the Department of Science and Technology (DST) in Bengaluru, found heat moving through thallium copper selenide (TlCu₅Se₃) in a wave-like way rather than as phonons, the lattice vibrations that normally carry it.
- That ultralow lattice thermal conductivity gives the crystal a zT of 1.7.
- Recovering electricity from industrial waste heat is the use claimed for it.
3 Sep 2026 · Prelims
Piezoelectric peptides
A piezoelectric material gives out charge when it is pressed or bent, and the useful ones have been hard, inorganic and unwelcome inside the body. Peptides, the biodegradable building blocks of proteins, are none of those things, and the Centre for Nano and Soft Matter Sciences (CeNS), another DST institute in Bengaluru, has now made them piezoelectric.
- Piezoelectricity needs a non-centrosymmetric structure, one with no centre of symmetry, so that molecular dipoles line up instead of cancelling.
- In water alone the peptides form nanofibres with no response; one per cent of a co-solvent switches the property on.
- The co-solvent triggers chiral self-assembly into exactly that order, the chemistry unchanged.
- Implantable sensors, electronic skin and wearables powered by a heartbeat are the uses claimed.
9 Sep 2026 · Prelims
3D printed bone grafts
A graft has to fit the hole it fills, which is the argument for printing one patient by patient. A material put inside the body also has to be non-toxic and tissue compatible, and the best of them are resorbable, dissolving as new tissue takes their place.
- The Technology Development Board (TDB), a statutory body under the Technology Development Board Act, 1995, funded a company to 3D print patient specific bone grafts.
- It pays for a proven technology's move to commercial production rather than for the research behind it.
- The grafts are printed from hydroxyapatite, the calcium phosphate mineral of most bone and tooth enamel, and from beta-tricalcium phosphate, both bioceramics.
- Two printing routes were named: Digital Light Processing (DLP), which cures a whole layer with a projected image, and extrusion, which pushes a paste through a nozzle.
2 Sep 2026 · Prelims
Thermoresponsive microgels
A microgel particle holds water while it is cool and squeezes it out when warmed, which is how a dose of drug can be carried and then let go. Packed tightly enough, such particles jam into a glass, solid yet as disordered as a liquid.
- The Raman Research Institute (RRI) in Bengaluru, also under the DST, jammed soft microgels into such a glass and found that a thermal shock briefly liquefies it and erases its memory of past heating and cooling.
- The particles collapse above 34 °C, just below body temperature, so a loaded microgel releases its drug at a target such as a tumour.