Batteries Made Obsolete by Chip-sized Turbine Engines?

Yep, as odd as the title of this post sounds, MIT researchers are already putting a tiny gas-turbine engine inside a silicon chip. The whole thing would end up the size of a quarter, and the resulting device could run around 10 times longer than a battery of the same weight. The engine can power laptops, cell phones, iPods, radios, future versions of the PSP… the list goes on and on.

Okay, so how do you go about building a coin sized fuel-burning engine?

Well you’ll need a compressor, a combustion chamber, a spinning turbine, and almost everything else you see in a normal engine. If you’ve looked inside the hood of your car long enough, you know what we’re talking about.

To make the whole thing really tiny, the MIT researchers turned to etched silicon wafers. In fact, their micro-engine is made up of six, piled up like pancakes and bonded together. Each wafer is a single crystal that has its atoms perfectly aligned, so that it is outlandishly strong.

Making single micro-engines costs an arm and a leg, so to save on funds, the researches made up to 60-100 components on a large wafer that they then carefully cut apart into single units.

At the moment the team is having difficulties with getting the combustion to work properly. You see, inside that mini-combustion chamber, the turbine blades spin at 20,000 revolutions per second – that’s 100 times faster than in jet engines. Imagine trying to manage that speed in something the size of a quarter. Thankfully, they claim that cooling all that speed down has so far been manageable.

The research was funded by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. Obviously, they’re very much interested in shrinking the huge battery packs that soldiers are now carrying for their electronic equipment.

Yep, as odd as the title of this post sounds, MIT researchers are already putting a tiny gas-turbine engine inside a silicon chip. The whole thing would end up the size of a quarter, and the resulting device could run around 10 times longer than a battery of the same weight. The engine can power laptops, cell phones, iPods, radios, future versions of the PSP… the list goes on and on.

Okay, so how do you go about building a coin sized fuel-burning engine?

Well you’ll need a compressor, a combustion chamber, a spinning turbine, and almost everything else you see in a normal engine. If you’ve looked inside the hood of your car long enough, you know what we’re talking about.

To make the whole thing really tiny, the MIT researchers turned to etched silicon wafers. In fact, their micro-engine is made up of six, piled up like pancakes and bonded together. Each wafer is a single crystal that has its atoms perfectly aligned, so that it is outlandishly strong.

Making single micro-engines costs an arm and a leg, so to save on funds, the researches made up to 60-100 components on a large wafer that they then carefully cut apart into single units.

At the moment the team is having difficulties with getting the combustion to work properly. You see, inside that mini-combustion chamber, the turbine blades spin at 20,000 revolutions per second – that’s 100 times faster than in jet engines. Imagine trying to manage that speed in something the size of a quarter. Thankfully, they claim that cooling all that speed down has so far been manageable.

The research was funded by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. Obviously, they’re very much interested in shrinking the huge battery packs that soldiers are now carrying for their electronic equipment.