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Hydrogen Micro Turbine Only 4mm In Diameter
savaget writes: "Luc G. Frchette of the Columbia University Microsystem Engineering Laboratory has developed a 20W electrical generator powered by a hydrogen turbine just 4mm in diameter. For more details, read the Wired
article or an older Popular Science
article. The tiny generator is more efficient than any battery and is expected to find military and commercial uses including robotics." Imagine the uses ...
I assume there's some sort of formula for figuring that out, could you share it with us.....?
There was a movie at some time or other where they had an electronic bee, run by remote control. A tiny power generator could make such things possible in the not-so-distant future. Imagine how far we've come.
There was a discussion several days ago about batteries that are refilled with gas, rather than recharged. It sounds rather messy to me, while a system that uses a hydrogen generator certainly sounds cleaner and more efficient.
I wonder what kind of noise this system makes. If it is very quiet, we may very soon find that batteries in some of the higher end consumer devices are replaced by some mechanical generator such as this.
It may even be suitable for use in larger power generation scheme. Think of clustering a whole bunch of these tiny generators. Although they are currently quite expensive to manufacture, I believe that micromachines and nanotech will soon advance to such a level that it will be very possible to mass produce tiny machines.
Which brings me to the idea of tiny machines that have their own built-in hydrogen power generator. Now that's technology!
Oh well.
You need energy to produce hydrogen. It would not come from a coal burning plant, would it?
No. My parents always had cats at home, and, as a teenager, I did a lot of experimenting with electronics. Cats do not mind sounds above 20 kHz (maybe they can't hear them?). They hate mostly the sounds between 8 and 12 kHz. Not coincidentally, that's the frequency range of the "hissing" sound cats make when annoyed or angry.
True. Just try to get a laptop powered by one of these through airport security...
2.4 million RPM on a turbine that is 4mm in diameter... its math time... .3 miles per second for the metrically challenged. Very long range rifles shoot at speeds on that order of magnitude.
2400000 R/M = 40000 R/S
1 R = 4mm*pi = 12.56mm
40000 R/S = 502656 mm/s linear velocity
503 m/s is pretty fast. Thats about
I havent done basic physics in a long time so i am rusty on the formulas; could someone do the energy/force calculations for me? Just off the top of my head i think 1 milligram (thats the equivalent weight of one cubic millimeter of water, which i think would be about the right order of magnitude for the blades on this turbine) moving at 503 m/s could do some daage to organic tissue, more so than a splinter at least.
Micromachining techniques are far from "perfect to the last atom or so".
They're akin to dipping easter eggs.
Actually, they're akin to dipping easter eggs in hexafluoric acid and making an educated guess as to when the shell has ablated by 2 microns.
Micromachined parts won't be perfect to the last atom until they're milled using a scanning tunnelling microscope.
--Blair