Micro gas engines - The Little Engine That Could Be

The micro turbine rotor.

The development of a fuel-powered miniature engine, touted as a more efficient and longer lasting alternative for the battery, may push the Energizer Bunny to the unemployment lines.
No bigger than a regular shirt button, the micro gas turbine engine uses the same process for producing electricity as its big brother electricity stations -- burning fuel and running it through a power plant.

"Fuel and air in, and electricity out," said Luc Frechette, one of the Microengine Project team members at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Frechette is currently assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University.
At about one thousandth the size of a regular power station, the engine-on-a-chip will create about 1 millionth the power level, producing 20 watts of power at 2.4 million rpm from its cubic centimeter-sized package.

"It will give 10 times the amount of power that is generated by the best lithium battery," Frechette said.

And when the engine runs out of juice you just fill 'er up again. There's no need to wait to recharge or run out to the store for new batteries.

"If you take a laptop battery for instance, it's just a bit bigger than a deck of cards. The engine would take up the space of, say, a quarter. The rest of the space would be for the fuel tank," Frechette said.
"This fuel could last you for 24 hours and then, when empty, you can just refill the tank."
Weighing less than a gram, the engine is constructed from eight wafers of diffusion-bonded silicon and consists of a combustion chamber that ignites hydrogen and shoots hot gas past a spinning turbine that powers the compressor to drive the machinery.

 "The military are very interested in these. The small robots sent into the WTC rubble, for instance, had to be connected with cables to power them because their batteries are too heavy to carry," Frechette said.

 

The micro engine would eradicate these problems., The commercial market will follow.

"For commercial use, the first application will probably be a battery charger -- if not actually in a laptop it could sit beside it," Frechette said. "Instead of having to get to an AC outlet, you can carry your power supply along with you."

this could be an alternative to batteries - although there could be other factors that will inhibit the uptake of this technology - like the new battery technology that looks promising. this could be the answer for recharging batteries at seas, at remote places on the earth etc.

engine on a chip promises to best battery

The Little Engine that could be