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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.
And you thought a hot battery in your lap was scary.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Yesterday they were putting lasers on a chip. Today it's engines. Tomorrow, I suppose I'm just going to live on a chip.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
It's the energy source of the future! It's...
...gas?
Caffeine is my anti-drug!
Duranin - A NWN2 Roleplaying Persistent World
The article doesn't mention what happens to the hot exhaust after it passes through the turbine. Does this mean that have not tackled this problem yet? This could give a whole new meaning to the whole "laptop frying your balls".
Miniature fighter jets with lasers all etched out of a silicon crystal.
We could drop half a billion of them over the middle east.
That's a really interesting read (pancake analogy aside), although it sounds like the resulting device will be pretty fragile. A small grain of sand or a little dust buildup would cause complete failure. Large mechanical systems have the ability to power through minor problems like that, but such a small one will not really be suited for military field use, I imagine.
Today they made a miniprojector: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5359724.stm
OK, I can picture the gas microturbine, and I can picture how a fuel/combustion energy source can outpower an electochemical energy source. However, do we have the capacity to make a generator that small. After all, we have the rotary power, how do we convert that into electrical energy?
I would be more interested in a bioelectric power source, like electric eel cells fed with sucrose.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
...a teeny, tiny seagull flies into the turbine?
Then they spend 200% of the allotted time to make sure what they wrote in the first 10% interact with one another correctly.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Since the mass of these materials is super small, the fact that they are moving at high velocity is no cause to hide under one's bed.
.. assuming that the "revolution" is a distance of 1 or 2 millimeters .. the ACTUAL velocity is nothing to send a letter home with.
.. the total force cannot exceed the energy output of the gas expansion .. which is the result of a few micrograms of fuel.
Also, at 20,000 rpm
Do the math (remember we are talking about the speed of the part of the object that is actually moving).
Another way of looking at it
A microturbine requires a completely new energy source; can you imagine plugging a butane canister into your portable? All turbines have physical issues around energy lost through heat; remember in a traditional engine only about 50% of fuel burned actually goes to perform work.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
I have to wonder how efficient it will be. Two things drive the efficiency of a gas turbine. The heat differentials and that leakage between the blades or impeller and the housing.
The leakage is going to be a real issue since it is a ratio between the disk size and the gap. Bigger engines mean a higher ratio. That is one of the reasons that BIG gas turbines are relatively efficient while small one suck fuel like there is no tomorrow.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I would imagine if it burns a fuel, it spits out carbon.
We need to stop burning stuff for our energy. Sure, batteries store energy made by mostly burning coal and stuff, but there other options for generating electricity to fill those batteries that don't involve adding carbon. I wish these people focused their research towards these types of energy sources.
Simple, small gas engines in lawnmowers and scooters are far, far dirtier than in a large modern car engine that has extensive polution control systems even when you take into account how much more gas a car uses than a lawnmower.
So I can't imagine this thing will run very clean at all. Not much room to put in a catalytic converter or other cleaning methods.
I have to wonder what a hundred million of these things running will do to indoor air quality. I don't think I want a thousand of these inside my office building.
Other than the obvious geek factor, why would we want to increase our dependancy on a fossil fuel.
--
Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
How cool will it be when you turn your laptop on and it sounds like a jet engine starting up!
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.
will they be putting tiny engines inside silicon*e* ? Just imagine, breasts that swing *themselves* even when the woman is standing still. It truly would be Utopia. Or Stepford. I always get those two confused.
Can it beat John Henry and his mighty hammer? Didn't think so!
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.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
...then I can eat Mexican food for lunch and power my laptop for free!
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
Short your Li-Ion battery with a nice fat conductor sometime and tell me what you get.
Disclaimer: I cannot be held responsible for any injury to person or property resulting from your potential stupid actions, whether I suggested them or not.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Just what we need these days, not less but MORE dependence on fossil fuels. What idiots! Besides the obvious problem of trying to fuel something that small at the gas pump and then paying for it in fractions of a penny, what about the carbon dioxide emissions that conbustion engines produce? Aren't we going to be in for a lot of people with lots of headaches and brain damage from using a device like this? Even though it's so small, it's STILL emitting carbon dioxide which is known to cause the more serious cases of fatal death. I still get behind my roaring battle cry: SOLAR POWER IS WHERE IT'S AT FOLKS!!! The sun is an abundant energy source. Amp the solar panel production up so that they are 99.999% efficient, and you won't need any other source of energy anywhere on the planet. Combine that with electricity resevoirs that can hold a couple hundred gallons of electricity, and you have a clear winner. Thumbs down on this for sure.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Yeah, when my laptop runs out of butane, I could just plug it into that butane outlet in the wall...
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2-stroke lawn mower? I haven't seen one of those in ages. I think LawnBoy made two-stroke mowers for a long time, but I thought they were all 4-stroke nowadays. Now my chainsaw, leaf-blower, hedge-clipper and weed-trimmer, are a different story.
For non-gearheads: If you need to fill 'er up with a mix oil+gasoline, you got yerself a 2-stroke.
The most important thing to do in your life is to not interfere with somebody else's life. -FZ
Well according to another article the turbine is 4mm in diameter, so google says .5 * 4mm * pi * 20000 is about 125.6 meters. 125 meters per second is about the velocity of a low end bb gun. Given my adolecent expirimentation in terminal ballistics, a similar low end bb gun will barely penetrate both sides of a soda can. It should be a simple matter to provide the engine with a scatter shield stronger than a soda can.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Well, a bottle of plain water (about 1 kg of matter) contains roughly 100 petajoules (10^17 J), and still they are known to explode very infrequently. What matters is how stable the energy state is.
Hate to reply to myself as a general rule, but I thought a little searching would pay off.
Here is a movie from Rolls Royce, not exactly the same, but it's nice.
Hot exhaust? What about poisonous exhaust? There's a reason people don't leave their car engines running in the garage with the door down. Can you imagine 50-100 laptops running these in a college lecture hall?
"Hey boss, c'mere! I got our engine-on-a-chip to work!"
*boss meanders on over*
*turbine stops spinning*
*boss walks away grumbling*
"Bbbbbut it worked! Really, it did!"
(PS: did anyone notice the "No Karma Bonus" checkbox?)
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