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Nanotech Pinball and Miniature Engines
glenmark writes "Researchers at the Solid State Electronics Laboratory at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden have developed the world's smallest pinball game. The video is fascinating. The flippers are electrostatically-actuated monocrystalline silicon cantilevers. I hope Pat Lawlor and Steve Ritchie see this. I have a feeling they would get a kick out of it." And in another nanotech story, psmears writes "Three hundred times more powerful than ordinary batteries, but much lighter and smaller? Researchers at the University of Birmingham have developed a micro-engine that will allow people to charge mobile phones using lighter fluid. Further information at Research-TV including photos and a film."
the video compares the size of the MEMS pinball to a Swedish Safetyy match, a .5mm lead and a human hair. The comparison really gives great perspective!
KARMA TAG! You're it.
This would be great for furnishing the game room of the one-millionth scale model of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
"These micro-engines have over 300 times more energy than an ordinary battery" is meaningless. If they mean total energy delivery over whatever time period you like, then microengines can beat batteries by a factor of a million trillion zillion, as long as you hook them up to a big enough fuel tank. In actual power capacity, though, microengines aren't anything special at all, yet.
The aim is little turbines the size of a sugar cube that run from butane or propane or whatever, and have several watts of output power; prototypes of such things have been spinning for a while now. The microengines shown in the U of B release, though, are minuscule piston units which have power output in the microwatts, if that. Heck, the ones shown in the release don't even have generators attached to them, so their electrical output at the moment is zero!
For your amusement: A reader also pointed this out to me; it's a reprint of a piece on the subject from the British "Sun" tabloid, and it reads as if they took the U of B press release and put it through a Markov chain program, or something.
It's good to know that alcoholism in the press is alive and well.
"These micro-engines have over 300 times more energy than an ordinary battery and are much lighter and smaller."
So a cellphone that needs a daily charging will now need a refill once a year?
I would wager that this claim carries a degree of exaggeration.
"I'm a loner Dottie, a rebel."
- Pee Wee Herman
I know you're just being a smartass, but actually I'd say that this thing is less susceptible to tilt and more to "surface" forces like friction and electrostatics compared to it's larger counterparts.
But nice gag all the same.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Oh, and thank you for noting.
I wish I could put that in a remote controlled RX-8. That'd be a neat toy. :)
Check out this rocking piece of nanotech.
About a year ago, Popular Science did an article on nanotech motors. They said that the biggest drawback of even the best Li-batteries is that no battery has even hit the 1% efficiency rating. Reasearchers hope that with these mini-engines, we may finally see power devices as small as a battery that can produce over 1% efficiency. I believe that 10% is their ultimate goal, although anything over 1% would still be worlds better than batteries. Granted, use in such devices as portable phones would actually mean that the micro engines would just be recharging the batteries, which would limit the overall efficiency to less than a 10th of a percent, but given other applications and better technology, such nano engines could replace Li-batteries in laptops and other high performance appliances. No more plugging your laptop into the wall, just go to the gas station and filler up ;) .
I came, I saw, She conquered.
Lets separate what real nanotech offers from what nanotech does in SF stories.
Firstly, look at some of the stories set now, written 50 years ago. How many of them have an even part way accurate description of, well, anything?
So, when your talking about nanotech, what are you actually thinking of?
What I'm thinking of is something that will be a bit like a cross between mechanical engineering and chemistry - make the various mechanical parts small so that they tend to operate in a chemicaly relevent length scale. That's the sort of thing that these micro-engines are.
Think about biology for a moment, and about the sorts of biochemical reactions that go on in a living being. Those are the sort of things that nanotach can do. I do not believe that we will see a "Universal constructor" type device for many centuries, if ever.
Note that the two examples that you give have been solved without the use of nano tech. Superconducting powerlines are in use in europe. They are unfortunatly only cost effective for short range (around 100 miles or so) high power transfers - but that's improving.
The problem with fusion is not materials. You cannot get a material that will contain a fusion reaction - instead they use magnetic containment. And the problem is keeping the thing stable. I cannot see how nanotech devices would assist in this.
So, in sumary, you are thinking of the effects of something, but I've no idea what.
A friend and I were having a discussion about this a few months ago. We both love "technology", but I think I tend to overboard on the side of seeing it as the tool withi which all problems can be solved. My friend has a more cautious view. He suggested that eventually there will be a time when this stuff will probably result in many problems:
:) You store the data model of your physical object and you discard the portions of the model that are repetitious.
-War (over who should use it and how it should be used.)
-New nanotech based "diseases" caused by their proliferation
-Political and ethical issues that no one can even dream of right now
The usual stuff to be sure, but nonetheless the kind of thing that someone like me would never think about. I think you are correct in your assertion that society and governance will have trouble catching up. They are already having trouble with the Internet alone. (Think spam regulation)
On another subtopic: I think that nanotech in it's current form is very much akin to the early days of computing when the first nixie tubes were being used as a display device. They displayed information in a very rudimentary fashion that still required human intervention to be interpreted to the common man.
What I think will be interesting in the future of nanotech is when we can manipulate matter as we do pixels in today's 3d rendering engines. Think of it as rendering reality... with filters... and the ability to manipulate textures... colors... etc.
I would suggest that all the algorithms we've been developing for 3D rendering will be the very fundamentals of matter manipulation software. Of course there are many other factors that we currently ignore in 3D that will be essential to real matter. (Don't want hollow object for one thing)
Just imagine the possibility of applying encryption and compression algorithms on matter.
From the technical angle, it's going to be a lot of fun. From the societal angle it's going to be very tumultuous.
Personally, I think that eventually waste dumps are going to become goldmines for discarded matter to use in the manufacturing of new materials. If I were interested in making money long term, I'd probably buy a few garbage dumps now and keep them in the family.
Un-news
The problem with fusion is not materials. You cannot get a material that will contain a fusion reaction - instead they use magnetic containment. And the problem is keeping the thing stable. I cannot see how nanotech devices would assist in this.
Better materials would help substantially with magnetic confinement fusion. In particular, something with a high tensile strength and a superconductor with high breakdown field strength would make many of the difficulties with magnetic confinement fusion magically go away. Higher field strength helps a *lot* (improving both density and confinement time).
I agree that nanotechnology is unlikely to help with this.
...so how long before we get micro sterling engines to power our notebooks off of the heat from their own processors? hmmm...