Engine On a Chip May Beat the Battery

Krishna Dagli writes, "MIT researchers are putting a tiny gas-turbine engine inside a silicon chip about the size of a quarter. The resulting device could run 10 times longer than a battery of the same weight, powering laptops, cell phones, radios, and other electronic devices." From the article: "All the parts work. We're now trying to get them all to work on the same day on the same lab bench." The goal is to do that by the end of the year.

Comments

Re:p = mv & F =ma

[gewalker]

Try 20,000 revs / sec

E = 1/2 mV^2

Mass should be small since mass/volume hase cubing scaling. I expect MIT is not too concerned about it since they did not mention it.

I used to work at Cummins research center -- watch a turbocharger burst test if you get the chance, basically dump in as much fuel/air as it takes to get the flywheel to fly apart. Test is: is the casing is strong enough to contain all the flying pieces.

Scaling down heat engines?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

When steam engines were invented and developed in England by Newcomen the science of thermodynamics was lagging the technology. The steam engines work obviously but they could not get scaled down versions of the steam engines to work at all in the lab. Mainly because real engines were made with cast iron but the lab models were made with brass and it conducted away the heat away too quickly. At this time a man named James Watt, an instrumentmaker by profession did lots of work on the lab models and made an improved steam engine by mainly making the steam condense outside the cylinder. Also he invented the Watts Governor to regulate the speed of the machine. The moral of the story is that, heat engines dont scale down as easily as electronics.

Fluids in general behave much more differently in microscopic quantities than in large bulk quantities. I expect to be lugging large batteries for some time to come.