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."

Comments

Huge arrays?

[Hektor_Troy]

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?

Yep...

[Goonie]

This microturbine research pops up on Slashdot every year or so.

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...

Re:Yep...

[2Bits]

Ok, I'm a computer programmer (major in CS), and I don't know much about electricity, and electro-mechanical stuff. And the question I'm going to ask might seem like it's coming from behind, so please turn up your tolerance level a bit.

I have an issue with dealing with heat here. Since almost everything must deal with dissipating heat, why can't someone invent something that collect the heat and re-use it to generate even more power? Everyone is putting a lot of genius into all kinds of methods to dissipate the heat, why not collect it for re-use? Just like garbage, we used to think about methods to dump it, now we are recycling it to get a lot more value out of it. Heat is energy, why don't we think about collecting it then?

I'm no good in mechanics and chemistry, but here's some ideas that pop up in my head (without too much thinking, of course). We certainly can collect the heat, pipe it through some kind of pipe, which at the end, heats up some chemical gas. As the gas expand, the pressure created is used to turn some other turbine (which is then used to generate more power again). As the gas expands, it will eventually cools down, and come back down, and gets reheated again.

The chemical gas gets heated, turn some turbine, get cooled down, reheated again. The turbine generates more power, and at the same time generate more heat. The heat is collected and re-used again. And the cycle continues. Now, we lose some efficiency in the whole process, therefore, we still need external fuel to power the whole thing. But by recycling the heat, can't we make the whole process more efficient, and reduce fuel consumption that way?

Re:Yep...

[PsiPsiStar]

I'm not sure I totally parse what you're suggesting, but here's the basic concept behind heat engines; (anything that produces movement, and thus possibly electricity, requires a difference between hot and cold. The term for this is a heat engine. They're also called carnot engines. ) "Waste heat" is heat that isn't sufficiently hot compared to the heat sink to generate much energy.

The energy generated by a heat engine is determined by the difference between the heat source and the heat sink. In other words, the difference between hot and cold. While there might be some use for waste heat (i.e. heating houses and roads in cold climates as they did back in my college, and possibly some other applications) anything that makes your heatsink in any way less cold will reduce the efficiency of the primary generator.

A progressive achievement

[cryfreedomlove]

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.

Re:A progressive achievement

[mdsolar]

I agree, the motivation to conserve is to reduce environmental impact, (or to save money) but it is not a virtue in itself. I would rather not even use the word conserve. I'd much rather see a goal to eliminate the use of fossil fuels. In doing that, I'd like to create a situation where we can use as much power as we like, play with it, enjoy it, leave the lights on all night just for fun (though draw the shades cause I like to see the stars when I'm out at night). Right now we live in a scarcity driven energy economy and this is no good at all.

The potential for renewable energy to provide much more power than we use now is clearly present. The Sun provides more than enough power directly and it also drives wind. What has been lacking up until now is large scale solar and wind power fabrication capacity. This is what makes these sources cheaper than coal which has already taken its scale advantage.
--
Solar: its abundant http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Something about the numbers doesn't add up...

[GameMaster]

Let me see if I get this straight:

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

microgenerators

[mdsolar]

At least one of your objections has already been covered on slashdot. http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/2 5/1331227

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=130810 &cid=10918320.

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.
--
Take the solar scale advantage: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Info on IHI Dynajet 2.6 genset mentioned in OP

[mnemotronic]

The MIT microturbine is interesting, but in the "what can you do for me today" category, the IHI Dynajet caught my eye.

Product PDF :: http://www.ihi.co.jp/ihi/file/technologygihou2/100 04_6.pdf which mentions this interesting phrase:

The Dynajet 2.6 is also undergoing development of mobile dry toilets featuring its Merit (3).

From :: http://www.ufto.com/clients-only/uftonotes02.html

Originally built for military and civilian use, IHI's Dynajet 2.6 KW microturbine genset is selling commercially in Japan is 1.2 million Yen (about $9000) "for use in Japan only" (kerosene fuel). There are no plans for export. They don't have a natural gas version. Very little information is available, though I do have a 2-page product description and spec sheet (*available). The unit measures 30"x10"x11" and weighs 140 lb. [The contact at IHI prefers not to be listed.]

from (PDF) :: http://www.jaif.or.jp/english/aij/member/2003/PDF/ May.pdf

Last year, about 90,000 small power generators were sold in Japan. Japanese manufacturers are now working hard to expand their sales and add new models to their product lines. IHI Aerospace, for example, has released a portable model, the Dynajet 2.6, driven by a microgas turbine. Fueled by kerosene, which is easier to store than gasoline, the generator retails for ¥1.2-1.3 million ($10,100-10,900). It is the lightest gas turbine-driven model on the market. The company is also developing a cogeneration system that utilizes waste heat from gas turbines.