Engine on a chip promises to best the battery
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 can, powering laptops, cell phones, radios and other electronic devices.
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The MIT team has now used this process to make all the components needed for their engine, and each part works. Inside a tiny combustion chamber, fuel and air quickly mix and burn at the melting point of steel. 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.
No doubt MIT likes how this quote reflects on MIT:
For all the difficulties, Epstein said the project is “an astonishing amount of fun” — and MIT is the ideal place for it. “Within 300 feet of my office, I could find the world’s experts on each of the technologies needed to make the complete system,” he said.
That quality (high concentration of leading experts) also explains why world class research universities are so important to innovation, scientific breakthroughs and economic gains.
Related: Engineering Schools for Economic Gain - The World’s Best Research Universities - Recharge Batteries in Seconds - Berkeley and MIT courses online
September 20th, 2006 at 6:08 am
Wow, let’s get that engine-on-a-chip technology going and make it available to the general population soon! I’m tired of my laptop running out of juice at the most crucial times — and I’m sure many other people are as well.
“Within 300 feet of my office, I could find the world’s experts on each of the technologies needed to make the complete system.”Now that is a fantastic quote!!!
November 15th, 2006 at 8:32 am
Instead of irradiating the environment with electromagnetic waves, a power transmitter would fill the space around it with a “non-radiative” electromagnetic field. Energy would only be picked up by gadgets specially designed to “resonate” with the field….