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MIT's Millimeter Turbine to be Ready This Year
Iddo Genuth writes "After a decade of work, the first
millimeter size turbine engine developed by researchers at MIT should become operational by the end of this summer. The new turbine engine will allow the creation of smaller and more powerful batteries than anything currently in existence. It might also serve as the basis for tiny powerful motors with applications ranging from micro UAVs to children's toys. In the more distant future huge arrays of hydrogen fueled millimeter turbine engines could even be the basis for clean, quiet and cost effective power plants."
In the more distant future huge arrays of hydrogen fueled millimeter turbine engines could even be the basis for clean, quiet and cost effective power plants."
WTF? Where's the hydrogen coming from? May as well say In the more distant future huge arrays of kitten engines could even be the basis for clean, quiet and cost effective power plants."
Well, it could be!
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Imagine a, oh, whatever, cluster of these!..
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Doesn't turbines get more efficient as they grow in size? I mean, it's not like you'll see power plants use hundreds of tiny steam turbines - they use a few huge ones.
Or am I missing something completely fundamental about the ones MIT's made here?
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Oh come on, we all know that this sort of power generation from hydrogen is a clear violation of thermodynamics. This is bad form, even for slashdot moderators.
Who's willing to bet that within a week of these things becoming operational, they're put to use by some MIT nerds making a portable air hockey set?
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
This is all well and good but what about all the little bugs that will get shredded in those little turbines? Are they going to paste millimeter-size warning signs? I think it's the least we could do for our tiny houseguests.
Yeah, it COULD revolutionize the whole world as we know it and make the Jetsons' lifestyle seem antiquated, OR...
A toy company puts out a few gimmick Pokemon-tied concept toys long after the end of the Pokemon marketing age, and nobody buys them. Despite the technological benefits of using the power components, the company management gets a sour taste of market performance and buries the whole thing under ten feet of peat and recycles them as firelighters. The technology is not used by other companies for a couple of extra decades because of the patents and other intellectual property entanglements. It is finally redeemed and used in an inadequately-explained Elvis-Presley-tied concept doohickey comes out in 2040 and sells from a Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue for $20K but only if ordered from the seat pocket from LEO during a Virgin Galactic flight.
[
Millimeter Turbins? Must be for really small Muslims.
Have you read my journal today?
If they are that small, and that efficient, why are we not decentralizing power sources. I cannot believe they would continue to use transmission lines, and such.
The thermal efficiency is the real killer - according to this post, the expected thermal efficency is somewhere between 3 and 8%.
That's problematic for two reasons - one, a plant made of thousands of these would use way more fuel than one using a conventional piston engine and one generator, and, two, for small-scale apps it means you end up with a massive pile of waste heat to dispose of. As somebody put it - if you want 10 watts of power, that means 100 watts of waste heat to dispose of. Go put your fingers on a 100-watt lightbulb to get an idea of how much heat we're talking about...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
A micro-turbine is not a fucking battery! An ultra-capacitor is not a battery! A fuel cell is not a battery!
Women everywhere will rejoice in the development of newer, more powerful...er...massagers.
Do they lift and cut as they're generating all that electricity, too?
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
I can almost understand people complaining about wind turbines and birds, but give me a fucking break.
if this paragraph were read by peter griffin, it would at least sound funny.
I can't wait to see some millimeter sized turbines fueling some millimeter sized fans to be built into my millimeter sized pants thread to blow millimeter sized air onto my millimeter sized...leg hair
eschew obfuscation
The thing about these is that they are so small. The figures given are not all that much greater than the Li ion batteries, so in terms of applications is transportation, one does a whole lot better putting five 5 gal gas cans in your trunk for a 1400 mile range. For compact applications getting more power in a tight spot is a great advantage. If you are carrying a lot of electronics this really helps in reducing the weight. But, I'm not sure you'd want to use these to replace the two stroke in an chainsaw.s -selling-solar.html
--
1000 W/m^2 http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
"20'th" century?
"the Wright brothers Kitty Hawk which flew for the first time that year had 12hp" The author seems to think Kitty Hawk is the name of their plane.
And this is in just the first two sentences.
They shoulda had some of those turbines powering their servers!
So we have a millimetre scale turbine. That's only half the electrical generation problem. How much of a coil can you make at that scale? How strong of a magnet can you have at that scale?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I hope this works out. I am interested in any invention that provides an environmentally clean method of power generation. The final goal of which is to increase the available per capita of energy. Forget conservation. The true progressive ideal is to find the means to allow for an increase in personal energy consumption.
Unless I'm misunderstanding the questions people are asking, the idea of Hydrogen comes from the fact that they've been developing ways to use it as a fuel source for quite some time now.
s pring/corn.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_vehicle
Similar to how they have already (I think) developed an engine that runs on some kinda corn oil, that costs like 5 cents or something ridiculously cheap along those lines, per gallon.
http://www.engr.psu.edu/newsevents/EPS/v13n2_1997
In the end, the only thing that matters is how much fun you had.
He says that he expects the initial products to be about 500-700 Watt-Hours/kg. and to, potentially, go as high as 1200-1500 Watt-Hours/kg. in the distant future.
My understanding is that this thing is supposed to run off of Hydrogen. It'd almost have, to as many consumer electronics are run indoors and most other fuels I know about give off toxic fumes when used in combustion engines.
Hydrogen has an energy density of ~33.3 Watt-Hours/kg. ( http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2005/MichelleFung.s html/ )
Now, assuming that the weight of the turbine (~4mm square) and packaging is negligible, most of the weight is fuel. In that case, we are looking at an efficiency of 1.5% - 2.1% for the initial models and 3.6% - 4.5% for the extreme upper end of what this guy thinks is foreseeable with this technology. 1.5% - 4.5% efficiency? That's horrible! Remember, pure hydrogen doesn't exist naturally on this planet. You had to spend large amounts of energy in the first place to produce the hydrogen that will be stored in these batteries (how exactly they plan on storing it I don't know because even the best, present day, techniques leak like a sieve because of the extremely small size of the hydrogen molecule).
Don't get me wrong, I can see where people would want something like this. The potential energy density compared to the compact form factor would open up new possibilities for portable equipment. There in lies the problem. The instant gratification of this technology will be almost impossible to fight. If every piece of small electronics had this kind of power source, cell phones, PDAs, laptops, etc. would become leaps-and-bounds more powerful and, at the same time, would be consuming energy at, potential, an exponentially higher rate.
The only way I can see this not becoming ubiquitous is if some other technology, like batteries, beats it to that energy density level. I don't think that's likely to happen because, even at these miserable efficiency rates, liquid fuels still have a massive lead in energy density over even the most promising, potential, battery technology known.
I hope there is an error in my math. Another possibility is that, as is so often the case, the author of the article doesn't have a clue of what he's talking about and had warped the facts of the story. The fact that he has suggested the possibility of replacing full-sized power plants with massive arrays of these turbines gives me hope that that's the case. If any of you have a correction for my math, please let me know.
-GameMaster
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
In 1903 the Norwegian inventor Aegidus Elling became the first person to successfully construct a gas turbine engine which produced more power than it required to operate
Wow, really?!? In the last 104 years we haven't been able to reproduce a system which produces more power than it takes to operate.
Those guys must have been really smart. Maybe it was a cold fusion gas turbine engine.
Thermodynamics be damned.
This Account Has Exceeded Its CPU Quota
What is a UAV. Is it like an SUV but smaller - Urban Ant Vehicle?
:(){
Oh its UAVs... thats a shame!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
The comments on the linked article is some of the funniest stuff ive read on the internet in many a moon.
I am the dreamer, you are the dream.
Hey, anyone here have Micro Machines as a kid? Imagine having a Micro Machine jet with real working engines.
I never knew the US was so central in the development of the Jet Turbine. I thought it was all Europe and Britain. Isn't it suprising how you find the history you learned at school is so different on slashdot?
Reduce, reuse, cycle
With this device, you can finally play the smallest electric violin for someone! Weeeh!
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
So not to put too fine a point on it, but this looks like an unfinished, untested device, of unknown cost, unknown reliability, unknwowm but probably impossible manufacturability, unstated but probably very low efficiency, using unavailable fuels, with uncompetetive features.
Slashdot, please wake up and get some critical thinking skills!
There is a closed room with 3 switches on the outside. One of these switches operates a light bulb in the room and for some reason you have an overwhelming urge to find out which one even if means you're stood outside forever ( or until you die ). You can't see into the room except when you open the door and for some other mysterious reason you can only open the door once and once the door has been opened you can no longer touch any of the switches.
So how do you know which switch operates the light ?
At least one of your objections has already been covered on slashdot. http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/2 5/1331227
0 &cid=10918320.
s -selling-solar.html
This link also covers the effort reported in the present post. Your comment on the efficiency of the proposed turbine anticipates some comments here. http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=13081
It was one of Bucky Fuller's favorite things to point out that heat management becomes easier with scale since the ratio of surface area (where heat escapes)-to-volume (where heat is stored) goes down in inverse proportion to the increase in linear dimension. This is why he felt that enclosing cities with his domes would be a good idea.
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Take the solar scale advantage: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
If I have a little milliturbine battery with 3 turbines, each rotating in one of the X, Y and Z axes, their combined gyroscopic motion will resist being moved in any direction. It's as if the battery is heavier - the faster the spin, the heavier the battery.
If I rotate the milliturbines backwards, will it get lighter, until the battery weighs nothing?
And can I move the turbines off the power the battery produces?
--
make install -not war
"with applications ranging from micro UAVs"...
The Diamond Age? =)
I think he's just confusing two different things -- a few mm-turbines running on hydrogen to power, say, flashlights and things, versus enormous arrays of them running on natural gas or something as a portable and inexpensive power plant.
Product PDF :: http://www.ihi.co.jp/ihi/file/technologygihou2/100 04_6.pdf
which mentions this interesting phrase:
FromThe Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
--Edward Dassmesser
Umh, anyone remember these Israeli ideas for hornet-sized autonomous assassination drones? I suppose getting an adaequate power source into these beasties should be considered the most important barrier.
Now,I may say that I definitely do not like the idea of any state having the capability to clandestinely target and murder individual people with so little effort...
Based on other experimenter's test results with direct combustion and the Tesla configuration, we should expect our overall fuel to shaft efficiency to come in around 31% -- placing our design right between gas piston and diesel piston efficiencies.
Wouldn't it be interesting if MIT engineered a bladeless turbin at a size that Tesla could not, and have it be the wave of the future?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
This is great, but, those that want to use this to supe up your laptop should be very aware of the directionality and position of the afterburner.
It's not so much the smell of burning hair that worries me, its the location of the hair that is being burned that has me concerned.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
There was some speculation that the "whine" of a PPG (of Babylon-5 fame) was likely from a tiny turbine spinning up.
Well, it looks like we'll have small power sources that we can use for something else.
(Imagines a bank of these to drive a railgun or BFG-9000.)
At 100 watt heat output. This gives a whole new meaning to exploding laptops.
I've thought about using a Tesla turbine on this scale, but if there is a stack of disks, it might complicate the construction process versus this bladed design. Or is there a MEMs process which can make a stack of disks?
The other way to use a Tesla-like design would be to use a single disk. Sort of like a design for a blood pump I've seen, though in that case it used a dome-shaped rotor.
Ok, seriously.
Somebody copy/paste parent and freaking add it to the WikiPedia entry.
Do you deny the power of the Time Cube?
http://www.timecube.com/
Kittens give Morbo hydrogen gas.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
1) Make small turbine.
2)????????
3) POWER!!!
-William
God is everything science has yet to explain.
On second thought, never mind. I love japanese TV.
---k--
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