Engine on a chip promises to best the battery – MIT News Office
Engine on a chip promises to best the battery – MIT News Office
Looks like MIT is close to getting the micro turbine functional. Article states that they hope to have it operational by the end of the year. 20,000 rpm revolutions per second (thanks for the correction Steve). Sucker is booking!
Themocracy
20,000 rps-as in revolutions per second, not per minute. I thought 20K rpm was kinda slow for a turbine that small, considering the big boys turn that much and more-and rotational speed is usually a factor of turbine blade diameter, since the g-forces on the tips of the blades go up at a huge rate as the blade gets longer/rpms go up. So this is more like 1.2 million rpm, if I have my powers of ten right this early in the morning. I wonder if the whine is ultrasonic….and at what point do you get so small that the air molecules just don’t want to cooperate with things like turbines? I don’t know, but before they are finished, I bet they will…..
Favorite quote from the article, about getting the turbine to turn the generator: “That turns out to be a hard thing to do.” ROFLMAO! Really? No! “Damn Fred! Did you drop that .5 micron cotter pin again…..”
All jokes aside, I wish them luck. I can think of some really neat thngs this could power, as well as some pretty sinister ones. Remember the hunter/killer in “Dune”? Who needs antigravity, with a variation of this, it could hover ala the Harrier and go after whatever you program it to sense and destroy.