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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
No, tomorrow its Snakes on a Chip!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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.
Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr! Ye' have never fought the likes o' a man eat'n shark with lasers atop their skulls!
Pffft! Chips with lasers! You yellow-belly land-lubber!
>No, tomorrow its Snakes on a Chip!
And the day after tomorrow it's Apostrophes on a motherfucking Chip!
...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
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.
The main reason that lawnmower engines are so incredibly dirty is that they are two-stroke engines. Two-stroke engines are inherently evil -- they burn dirty and emit huge quantities of unburnt fuel -- but they have a higher power-to-weight ratio and therefore see use where a small, powerful engine is required. It has a lot more to do with the engine design than it does the size. As for the pollution controls in cars, don't forget that car engines have to deal with an incredibly wide range of ever-changing speeds and power requirements. It's quite difficult to build an efficient engine which operates across such a wide range of speeds, but a simple engine driving a generator can operate at precisely one speed with a fixed load and can therefore be optimized for its precise requirements.
Further. the researchers in TFA are not building a piston-driven engine at all, they are building a gas-turbine engine. While it's difficult to speculate on the efficiency at this point (the thing doesn't even exist!), I would expect it to be relatively clean.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
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.
I'd imagine it can be tuned to run from any hydrocarbon based fuel source. Sources such as alcohol should be carbon neutral. There's nothing that says it has to be from fossil fuels.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
Electric eel generator, bird beak phonograph needle and dinosaur garbage disposal are already patented by Fred Flintstone.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
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
Yeah, when my laptop runs out of butane, I could just plug it into that butane outlet in the wall...
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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!"