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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.
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.
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Millimeter Turbins? Must be for really small Muslims.
Have you read my journal today?
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?)
Your humour well has run dry - commence drilling elsewhere.
"Get off the cross - we need the wood" - Tori Amos
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
Yeah. Really silly, huh?
But, just for fun (since I can't remember), which law of thermodynamics does the production of power violate?
I'm looking at 'em, but I can't find a law of conservation of power. I'm sure that's the one you meant, though, right.
Hmm... I guess I'm going to have to walk to work tomorrow. My car is currently sitting in the driveway producing no power (since none of it's components are doing any work at all), and thanks to xaxxon's newly discovered law of conservation of power, that means it isn't going to be producing power in the future, since it's previous means of doing so was by using stored energy rather than any form of power.
Incidentally, I think I'm going to have to cut this post short. I imagine it's not going to be too long before somebody realizes that computers have nonconstant power systems and it stops working. I just pray nobody gets around to doing the same to all life on this planet.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
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