Slashdot Mirror
Microgenerators Coming Soon to Electronics Near You
fygment writes "A new microgenerator developed at Georgia
Tech can now produce enough power to run a small electronic device, like a cell phone, and may soon be able to power a laptop. The microgenerator is about 10 millimeters wide, or about the size of a dime. When coupled with a similarly sized gas-fueled microturbine (or jet) engine, the system, called a microengine, has the potential to deliver more energy and last 10 times longer than a conventional battery. This is still just a quarter of the problem. A turbine
is still being developed to turn the generator and that will require fuel and storage of some kind."
Yes, what a great idea, let's INCREASE our dependency on fossil fuels for powering our portable electronics.
And the hot exhaust from the turbine would feel absolutely lovely against one's leg while being carried in a pocket.
Somehow I don't see this miniature jet engine concept really "taking off" (hur hur).
Welcome to the age of steam powered laptops!
The Cache of the magazine
The cache of the gatech site
Nothing to see here
Surely, if it's a generator running off a turbine running off another fuel, surely it's just a whole big waste of energy in a small space? My science skills are not what they used to be but I don't see why this is great?
Enlighten me please!
I don't care about cell phones, whatever, can it power a small fridge to keep my beer cool?
You know, the one where the guy is chasing his MP3 player down the street. I didn't realize that they were turbine Energizer batteries. Duh!
EricSee your HTTP headers here
I can see MP3 players of the future becoming like cars in the movies. Drop it, and watch the spectacular explosion as all the fuel goes up.
The next thing will be a private nuclear reactor.
click
its a gotse tpye site!!!!
Nothing for you to see here, Please move along.
What I want to know is can I use this to build my mouse a gocart. At last he will no longer live in the shadow of that bastard speedy gonzales!
Beep beep.
It's also 39% of an inch ... but everybody knows that.
This is not a mirror...
but can we at least pretend we care about the servers we link to?
A 1.5 meg jpg as the first link in the story is a disaster anyone can see coming...
"Why worry? Each of us is wearing an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on his back."
The microgenerator is about 10 millimeters wide, or about the size of a dime.
1cm will do just fine :p
....and is a "quarter" of the problem. Hahahaha. That's some funny shit.
Ga Tech
tdh42134.jpg
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
A while back, there was an article about how implants could be powered using body heat by using the thermoelectric effect (heat causes electrons to move, which creates current). Wouldn't it be possible to do the same thing with the heat coming off a computer system, especially the CPU and GPU?
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
A turbine is still being developed to turn the generator and that will require fuel and storage of some kind.
Think outside the box. You've got a 10mm generator, but no way to turn it...
Hamsters! They're cheap and portable. They're a renewable resource. They generate very little excess heat. Their fuel source is available almost anywhere, is non-toxic, and doesn't explode.
Just picture it, the whole world over, millions of laptops, and on top of each screen a hamster in a cage. This is the face of technological improvement.
The cure for cancer is coming: Reovirus
Didn't we just see an article about exploding phone batteries? Is this competing to make smaller things explode in an even more impressive way?
Sample this!
Jet Engine on a Chip
university of Birminghmam, England did this previously.
Given the nasty realities of thermal efficiencies, I doubt this thing can be more that 33% efficient. That means that the device will run 3 times warmer than current battery-operated versions. Given the behavior of most modern-day laptops, that will be far too hot.
Of course, the invention will work very well with better designed hardware and software. Anyone who thinks they need more than 500 MHz processor for most applications (and more than 50 MHz for basic office applications) is either playing games or using bloatware.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Fuel cells, increasingly efficient solar, modular, small scale (pebble bed) nuclear reactors - I'm seeing the beginning of the end of the conventional power grid.
One of the advantages of decentralization is you no longer have big juicy targets for terrorists - who'd attack a neighborhood-size solar station or fuel cell stack? And if they did, the damage would be limited in scope.
Wouldn't it be fantastic if they made it detachable with a cord and some sort of clamp? You could stick it out the window of a train or car and tied with a regular battery and a nice propeller, you could have power for your laptop through long journeys.
If only planes had windows...
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
I would refer you to page 3 of any Thermodynamics text book. You could get a little bit of energy back, but not anywhere near as much as was spent heating them up. In the case of implants, your body is providing energy through the combustion of fat and or sugars which the implant can use a little tiny bit of.
They just need to team up with these guys.
"a prototype silicon microturbine produced using semiconductor-type microfabrication methods may be operating by the turn of the century." "The team is now conducting component testing, which should be complete in 1998, Epstein said." And the biggest clue of all, down at the bottom of the page " © 1997 by The American Society of Mechanical Engineers" Is slashdot that hard up for stories? I wish I had a sig. *sigh*
Shows how much you know about modern power. Almost all of our electrical power sans wind generated, dammed or solar, are "steam" powered as you say.
A nuclear plant is nothing but a fancy way of boiling water to turn, you guessed it, steam turbines to generate electricity. Same with gas and oil-fired power plants.
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
because it will likely require at least the same amount of feul as can fit in a normal battery, but will be less convenient since you can't just plug it into the grid to recharge.... not to mention the already mentioned risks, or the extra pollution and noise (this will likely produce much more noise then a computer fan)
Dear Mr. Nameless,
Refresh my memory, what's the most widely used combustible fuel right now?
If it does run on something other than crude oil products, good. But I'm not holding my breath. Still, the little thing probably can't consume TOO much at that size. Ha ha.
Here are links to more articles:
Space Daily
GaTech
A Student's description
Could someone please explain why every single mention of using heat as energy is followed by at least one and usually several "uh, no, uhhh, basic thermodynamics, n00b, can't get more energy than is put in, n00b" responses?
The only theory that makes sense is the "people as batteries" line from the Matrix.
Yes, heat can be used as energy, and YES the Matrix line made sense and YES there are working examples like STEAM ENGINES, which were invented, oh, some 150 YEARS AGO.
Thank you.
Consumers, industry, and the military are all demanding smaller power supplies for smaller and more pervasive electronic devices. Researchers at the National University of Singapore and California State Polytechnic University (Pomona) recently developed a microgenerator to meet these needs. As long as hydrogen and air are fed into it, the 1-cm3 device generates 4.5 W.
Previous proposals for microgenerators attempted to scale down existing generator designs, but their moving parts made them difficult to manufacture. The team's proposal dispenses with moving parts entirely. The new design radiates heat obtained from hydrogen combustion. A selective emitter focuses the radiation into a small range of wavelengths, and a photovoltaic converter subsequently turns the radiation into electricity.
Sugars. Every animal on earth uses them in copious amounts. Why?
The various incarnations of such devices run on either methenol, alcohol, or lighter fluid.
Please explain to me how you'll get enough heat from a CPU and GPU to power them? Moron. It's really a first law violation given that no one is envisioning putting the C/GPU is in a box of pyroelectric material, and that the heat isn't all radiated in one direction. Beyond that there is still the second law problem. Some of the heat MUST be lost forever to entropy. And in a process like this "some" typically means the "vast majority."
You either didn't read your assigned chapters, or you didn't read the post that was responded to. Take your pick.
nt
Damn. Rather, 1.0cm = 10mm
He's talking about Wordperfect written in assembly. I think he should go back and try it before his misty watercolored memories turn into full blown delusion.
Just imagine:
There you are, staring at me again.
Systems check: goA AAAAAAAAARRRRRR!!!!!!
Fuel check: go
Ignition: GO!
fffffffwwwiiiiiiiiiiiiiwwwwwrrrrrrroooOOOOOOOAAAA
Please type Ctl Alt Del or insert your smartcard.
(At least we won't be able to hear this annoying sound when windws boots.)
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Please explain to me how you'll get enough heat from a CPU and GPU to power them?
You get the heat to power something else, or you reduce the power requirements of the CPU. Thermodyamics doesn't make all heat disappear to the land of happy flowers and dancing butterflies.
Unless, of course, it's a response to a "heat as energy" thread, in which case we have to read, for the billionth time, yet another self-congratulatory reminder to all of us n00bz that "uh, no, uhhh, can't get more energy than you put in, n00b"
It was old in about the four millionth thread.
Lord you are dense.
RTFA!
Get a clue.
As others have so clearly posted YOUR ELECTRICITY THAT YOU USE TO CHARGE YOUR CURRENT BATTERIES COMES (most likely) FROM FOSSIL FUELS - all this is doing (IF IF IF IF it ran on fossil fuels) is removing all the inefficiencies of power distribution, the wall-wart, and the battery charging = LESS FOSSIL FUEL USE!
Oh, then please quote the part of my original post that you responded to that claimed you couldn't get any power? And BY THE WAY, Thermodynamics does describe all heat disappering in an open universe like ours.
Not to the n00b at the bottom of this one. Otherwise he wouldn't have asked.
of the Emergency Broadcast System.
While genetically engineered microscopic hamsters may be some years away, research into tiny internal combustion engines that could drive such a generator is definitely being done. The work of the Berkeley Combustion Processes Lab was in the news a couple of years ago when they showed some prototypes. The stuff can be seen in some detail at http://www.me.berkeley.edu/mrcl/
The problem is not to be able to use the heat as an energy source, this of course can be done. As you mentionned, any steam engine will convert heat into mechanical power.
However there does not exist to my knowledge a converter which will convert 100% of the heat to another kind of power. Therefore some of the energy will be lost (a lot with our current technology). This is why every time someone mentions a system which feeds itself on the heat it emits, he(or she) is reminded that this is not possible because of themodynamics rules.
To reword using the example of the original poster: you can't use the heat generated by a CPU/GPU and turn it back into electricity to power you CPU/GPU. Given our current tech, doing this would only provide a small part of the total power needed to power the CPU/GPU. You must have another power source.
in other words : the perpetual machine doesn't exist yet.
'Every single mention' is well outside the scope of this thread.
This PARTICULAR mention, however, clearly describes a closed system - an attempt to use the heat from a computer component to power the computer that's heating the component. A quick look at the original post and perhaps two seconds of thought would have made it obvious that this is an entirely different class of system than the steam engine you're pointing at so smugly.
(And the Matrix line would only make sense in the context of a situation where they were feeding the humans with something that couldn't be converted to energy some other, more efficient way. Which, given the rather high overhead in the human-body-as-power-generator, seems vanishingly unlikely. But it's not really a question of thermodynamics, at least.)
Just last week, the Artic Council released its findings that show that people and animals living in the Arctic region are suffering quickly from ongoing global warming, with many species expected to go extinct. Prime farmland in other areas of the world will have altered rainfall patterns, turning much of them into lower yielding rangeland. The Western US is already struggling through 7 years of drought, further straining the falling aquifers, such as the Ogallala.
Granted, a calculator wouldn't use as much fuel as the typical SUV, but simply adding more uses of fossil fuels (or those indirectly produced with fossil fuels) puts us deeper into the negative ramifications of those fuels.
"Detailed calculations indicate that the actual scaling is not quite that dramatic, but a millimeter-size engine would have a thrust-to-weight ratio of about 100:1, compared with 10:1 for the best modern aircraft engines."
:)
This gives me visions of a jumbojet with the whole wingspan covered in thousands of really small jet engines.
You people are missing the point. They Tryed this stuff about five (5) years ago and it DOESN'T WORK!!!! The turbines last about 3-5 minutes --- Oh, thats great for a "Jet wing". Get up in the air 10,000 ft and then watch the wing fail.
That's gold, old boy, gold!
This will be worse than people concentrating on their cell phones being run over in traffic.
I predict a wave of guys getting nailed by buses because they're totally focused on their Gameboys, and having an entire city block nuked when the jet fuel tank on the guy's back goes up in flames as a result...
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
Since these generators are so much more efficient than batteries, and so small, why not hook them to an electrolyzer, storing the energy as hydrogen, in pancake-sized cells with gyros to spin them? Human motion can be captured for all our devices. Not only will we power devices without foreign oil, but Americans will have a reason to get off our asses and exercise - desperately needed by the most battery-hungry demographics.
--
make install -not war
Here you are, passionate about conservation and the enviroment arguing against a change which would reduce consumption, out of ignorance.
1) these devices don't use fossil fuels.
2) they are quite efficent. Far more efficient than dig up fossil fuel, haul to power plant, distribute to home over well maintained electrical grid, charge battery.
3) due to the need to create the fuels, more growing would be done sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere to meet our rapacious demand for energy.
And in other news, the earth is not static. It's stupid to expect it to be so. Adapt and thrive, or stagnate and die.
The idea isn't to get ALL of the power from the heat off the CPU, just to reclaim SOME of it. Reclaiming 5% of the energy is better than venting it out the exhaust port, isn't it?
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
Funny, we hear all this new technology like hydrogen fuel cells using sodium borohydrate, microgenerators. We also hear a lot about "alternative energy". Alternative = anything but oil. Yet we never hear about the consequences of these alternative energy sources. Occasionally, on page 16 of the local newspaper, you'll see a story that talks about the hazardous waste problem in China, Malaysia, or Korea due to the manufacturing of these "alternative energy" products.
And we tell ourselves that we're better off.
It reminds me of the solar panel people. "Look, we can save all this energy! Never mind that we just created a bazillion tons of hazardous waste making the solar panels."
- The power output goes down by a factor of 1,000. (power out is proportional to L x W x H )
- The friction in the bearings goes down by a factor of 100 (proportional to surface area of bearings)
- The windage losses due to air friction between the generator rotor and stator stay about the same.
- The air friction losses in the turbine may go waay up (as the ratio of turbulent flow to mainline flow goes way up).
- The thermal input from the burning gases goes down by a factor of 1,000.
- The thermal losses only drop by a factor of 100. Eventually the losses become greater than the thermal input, making it impossible to sustain burning.
So every time you shrink these things, the power out goes way down, the efficiency goes waaay down.Do this a few times and you'll have a turbine that can't even overcome its internal friction and a generator that, even if you could turn it, would be way down on the efficiency scale. Shrinking these things is a very very very *losing* thing to do.
This is a small electric generator - no big deal. Small electric motors & generators have been around for a very long time.
More than forty years, in fact.
At a minimum you'd want the device to reclaim at least as much energy as was spent building and distributing it. In reality you probably want it to be able to pay for itself to the point that it was cheaper to install the device than buy the extra energy. That last one will almost certainly never happen. Most of what makes them expensive is energy spend making them and cleaning up the mess. So to get cheaper you can either hope to become fantastically more efficent at cleaning up the mess (not likely) or have energy prices come down. And if the later happens, the energy that the device would replace has come down as well.
Surely fuel cells have potential to be more effecent then using a minature engine burning fuel, as that has to go through several energy conversions (chemical > mechanical+wasted heat > electrical) rather then converting the chemical energy straight to electricity
To power the new Radeon Mobility X800 graphics card, your laptop will enable the afterburner. This will inject kerosene into the exhaust jet to provide additional power to the generator. Please keep the laptop away from combustible materials for your own safety. During operation, you should wear noise protection earmuffs and keep a fire extinguisher handy. Turbine blades must be inspected by your closest General Electric Turbines facility each 10,000 hours of operation. Only use unleaded JET A1 fuel. DANGER: Avoid jet blast! Do not obstruct the air intake or data loss may occur.
--- Eat my sig.
I can generate well over 300 watts on a bicycle. You can generate 100 watts essentially indefinitely without breaking a sweat.
You want to listen to your iPod? Hook it up to your bike!
I wear my iPod when I'm on my bike. Imagine how much cooler it would be if it didn't neeed a battery...
about 10 millimeters wide
It's also about 10,000,000 nanometers wide, or 0.00001 kilometers wide. But none of these three options has quite the polish of saying it's 1 centimeter wide.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
Shouldn't these engineers be concentrating on building a miniature Stirling engine instead? The processor itself could provide most of the heat for the engine. Also, this would make the whole system a lot more efficient. Instead of generating more wasted energy in the form of heat, the heat from the processor would be recovered and turned into more electricity.
A metremeter is device for measuring things that are 1 metre long. It has only two numbers 0 and 10 marked at opposite ends.
A metermetre is a metre within the precision (and accuracy) of the meter that was used to measure the metre.
A metermeter is a device used to measure meters in units unknown.
A metremetre is a square with area of 1 metre in length on each side. A metremetremetre would be used for cubes.
Thank you.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Don't be a tool. GP poster wasn't suggesting anything close to perpetual motion nonsense.
That's exactly what he suggested.
They already do, methanol from Home Depot. Alcohol in the form of a fifth of vodka. And lighter fluid is sold in containers of lighter fluid in drug stores everywhere.
Methanol, ethanol, butane or naptha. Any one of them, with appropiate air/fuel mixture and adjustments to compression pressures, would probably fuel it quite well.
Problem, though. Control of temperatures, pressurized gases, liquids, etc. would probably (conservatively) be 100 times more difficult than current (as in, contemporary, not in terms of dq/dt) engineering problems involving batteries. Neglect, for a moment, the inevitable design and manufacturing errors causing recalls: Drop your cellphone, crack a turbine blade. Two weeks later in your pocket, the engine grenades. It's like hydrogen cars - neat idea from a technical standpoint, but suicidally stupid in the real world.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Dude, you just gave me a chubby.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
You take a crystal radio, tune it to a strong AM station, run the output not to a loudspeaker but to a rectifier, then use that to power a transistor radio which you can tune to any station.
Viola! Free energy!
Tell me again, who knew Mary was a virgin, and how did they know?
Local laws notwithstanding (because I'm sure you were talking about a stationary bike, right?), why don't you try to build one yourself? There are already plenty of plans on how to build iPod charger using batteries. So it's not so much of a stretch to imagine a generator charging the battery pack, charging the iPod...
Now instead of carrying a cellphone and a Zippo in my pocket, I will have the choice for a 2-in-1 combo!
I am a bit fuzzy as to how I need something that will literally burn a hole in my pocket. And, IIRC, at 100K RPM, doesn't it act like a gyroscope?
My wife doesn't listen to me either...
Why would your cell phone be in your pocket at full transmit power?
Tim Taylor would be proud.
ID 10 T ERROR
You forgot the warning in 72-point type: "Use ONLY in a Well-Ventilated Area."
Also, these warnings are printed in eight different languages, all translated by Babelfish.
Tag lost or not installed.
This would be great for paintball guns, just run the turbine off the already being used gas (usally CO2, NO2 or comp air) to power the guns electronics.
You know what's even better than that? With Modern Technology, you don't have to remember ANY of that. You can type:
the speed of light in furlongs per fortnight
into http://google.com/ (or just click This Link) and it responds with an answer. I didn't check if it's the RIGHT answer, but the 10^14 factor seems to be in the ballpark.
Tag lost or not installed.
and from looking at TFP, it looks easy enough to do those "coil" layouts on a regular printed circuit board. TFAseems to have given away the rest: Use a rare-earth magnet encased in titanium for strength at the very high RPM's generated by a dental drill.
That soldering job (the six wires coming off the board) looks horrible. My worst SMT soldering looks better than that.
Tag lost or not installed.
We use them, sugar cane, to produce ethanol.
And yes, it burns cleaner than gasoline.
Vegetable oil based fuel requires fossile fuels to produce. I've read statistics indicating that the conversion doesn't work in our favor. A greater amount of energy from fossile-fuel is required to produce a much smaller amount of energy from vegetable fuel. All the tractors, trucks, water pumping stations, etc. used by the industry that produces the Ethanol are still coming from fossile fuels. Therefore, vegetable oil fuels like the Ethanol aren't really going to solve the problem on their own. At this point, talking about cleaner burning fuels and environmentally friendly fuels is only marketing FUD, until the rest of the dependencies are satisfied with non-fossile fuel energy sources (nuclear power, etc ,...)
...or about the size of a dime. When coupled with a similarly sized gas-fueled microturbine (or jet) engine...his is still just a quarter of the problem
Looks to me like nickel short...
What?