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

I wonder how safe they will be?

[nizo]

Turbine blades, made of low-defect, high-strength microfabricated materials, spin at 20,000 revolutions per second -- 100 times faster than those in jet engines.

And you thought a hot battery in your lap was scary.

Re:I wonder how safe they will be?

[Xymor]

Lasers and turbines on chips? I think this is an elaborate plan to make deadly military level pc components. With the detection of non-drm'd media, the chip will eject, fly close to you and shoot you in the face. It's the next level after "Trusted Computing", "Feared Computing".

Re:Cripes!

[Gothmolly]

No, tomorrow its Snakes on a Chip!

Wow!

[Kirin Fenrir]

It's the energy source of the future! It's...

...gas?

Hot exhaust?

[Bryansix]

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".

Re:Hot exhaust?

[Waffle Iron]

what happens when it runs out of gas?

I'm going to go way out on a limb here and speculate that when it runs out of gas, the engine stops turning.

Re:Hot exhaust?

[necro81]

One thing that many people forget - mostly due to the impression given by hollywood - is that gasoline and diesel don't explode at the drop of a hat. But the liquid form doesn't ignite, it must first be vaporized and mixed with oxygen before you have something that will readily combust. If you had a closed container of fuel, and prevented oxygen from getting in, it would be pretty safe. Even when liquids were allowed on airplanes, there weren't many stories [possibly none - does someone know of any?] of terrorists using gasoline in a bomb, despite the fact that it is easier to get than explosives and readily concealed.

Even a gas tank, which gets filled with air as the gas is used, rarely explodes even in the most violent car crashes. Usually what happens is that the fuel gets sprayed everywhere and burns on the surface. An explosion wouldn't come from all the gas suddenly burning, as happens with a genuine explosive, but from the vapors in the tank combusting and causing the tank to rupture.

I know where this is going...

[jakedata]

Miniature fighter jets with lasers all etched out of a silicon crystal.

We could drop half a billion of them over the middle east.

Re:Cripes!

[eko33]

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!

Re:Cripes!

[mobby_6kl]

>No, tomorrow its Snakes on a Chip!

And the day after tomorrow it's Apostrophes on a motherfucking Chip!

What happens if...

[Lurker2288]

...a teeny, tiny seagull flies into the turbine?

Re:What happens if...

[Duhavid]

Teeny tiny feathers fly out

All parts work, just need to put it together

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

ha, ha ha. How many times the rookies in my dept have come to me excitedly and said, "Great news Boss, Got all the functions implemented and unit testing checked out ok. All I need to do is to put it together. Finished 90% of the code in just 10% of the time. Want to take a month off to chill out in Aruba!"

Then they spend 200% of the allotted time to make sure what they wrote in the first 10% interact with one another correctly.

Why???

[thepacketmaster]

Other than the obvious geek factor, why would we want to increase our dependancy on a fossil fuel.

Re:Why???

[shrikel]

Because as we move to hybrid gas-electric vehicles, more and more mechanics are finding they need a degree in electronics just to be able to fix your car. So to level the playing field, we felt that electronics geeks should have to learn how to fix an engine too.

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.

so when...

[not a cylon]

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.

Re:Generator?

[Comboman]

I would be more interested in a bioelectric power source, like electric eel cells fed with sucrose.

Electric eel generator, bird beak phonograph needle and dinosaur garbage disposal are already patented by Fred Flintstone.

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.