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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."
Imagine a, oh, whatever, cluster of these!..
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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?
The hydrogen comes from the kittens, doofus!
I don't therefore I'm not.
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.
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Millimeter Turbins? Must be for really small Muslims.
Have you read my journal today?
Well, huge ones might be useful on a large scale but they aren't practical on a small scale, hence the smaller turbine :)
Your humour well has run dry - commence drilling elsewhere.
"Get off the cross - we need the wood" - Tori Amos
Go put your fingers on a 100-watt lightbulb to get an idea of how much heat we're talking about... Ouch, you insensitive clod.
God spoke to me.
Let's see... "Huge arrays of kittens" make a "QUIET [...] power plant". Yeah, right!
I don't even want to think about the litter box.
blog
WTF? Where's the hydrogen coming from?
Mr. Fusion!
KFG
I just put my fingers on the bulb and didn't feel anything. Wait, does that mean I'm an insensitive clod?
No, it means that you need to turn it on first.
Even a thousand whispers can get pretty loud
I beg to differ. Wikipedia lists the sound pressure level of a whisper at 20 dBs. To calculate the sound of a thousand people whispering, we need to do 20 times log10(ratio). The ratio is 1000 whispers to one. log10 of 1000 is 3, so the SPL level of a thousand people whispering is only 3 time 20, or 60 dBs.
However, though wikipedia does not state at what distance the SPL level of a whisper was measured, usually we would imagine that it would be a person standing right next to us, or certainly within a meter. Clearly you cannot have a thousand people standing right next to you. Even within a meter of you, considering perhaps two people per square meter including yourself, within a circle of a one meter radius you have only about 3 square meters - room for 5 people besides yourself at the centre. To accommodate a thousand people, you would need a circle with a radius of over twelve meters. Most of those people are going to be at least 6 meters away from you. Wikipedia says "Note that the SPL emitted by an object changes with distance d from the object with 1/d.", so that implies that well over half of these people only contribute a fraction of their potential to the total sound level.
Beyond that, we have all these whispers generating an incoherent pattern of sound waves, sometimes reinforcing each other, and sometimes cancelling each other out, such that by the time this reaches your ears it has only a fraction of the energy that it would posses if everybody whispered in absolutely perfect unison, offset by their distance from you. In the end, the total SPL level is beyond my capability to calculate, but I would just guess that on a practical level it would not reach the level of a normal conversation between two people.
Now, if you want to hear something loud, consider the sound of a thousand hands clapping. Going by the previous example, it is easy to calculate. We begin with an estimate of the sound pressure level of one hand clapping... Oh oh...