MIT developing an "engine on a chip" to beat the battery

After busting out those floating windmills earlier today, you'd think the MIT types would take a little break, maybe relax for a nice evening of D&D, but instead they're still hard at work, bringing power to the people. This time they're thinking small, with a new gas-turbine engine the size of a quarter designed to supplement or replace the battery in consumer electronics. The new "engine on a chip" technology builds all the traditional parts of a gas-turbine engine using silicon, allowing for utterly tiny, reliable and efficient components. The turbine blades spin at 20,000 revolutions per second, and the mini-generator produces 10 watts of power once up and running. Unfortunately, the MIT wiz-kids haven't quite got a working model yet. Each component has been successfully built and tested, but they haven't squeezed them all together, though they should have it all up and running simultaneously by the end of the year. The tech could be a boon to the Army (which is funding the project), since troops are often required to carry up to three days worth of laptop batteries for a field mission, but we're totally stoked to start smogging it up in Starbucks with our little turbine a-whirring and spreadsheet a-crunching. Other than that spreadsheet part. Those suck.

[Via Slashdot]

[Sudi @ Sep 19th 2006 10:47PM]

wow!.. so many different battery options lately..

[spil @ Sep 19th 2006 10:48PM]

Ya, spreadsheets do suck.

"...relax for a nice evening of D&D" Nice.

..."supplant or replace the battery consumer electronics." you mean "supplement" and "...battery 'of' [or 'on', wither one works] consumer electronics."?

[Richard Lai @ Sep 19th 2006 10:48PM]

Could this be good news for laptops too?? :)

[pj @ Sep 19th 2006 10:49PM]

Wow, power and 20kHz noise to drive away the teenagers. I'm sold.

[PacketMonkee @ Sep 19th 2006 10:51PM]

This is crazy cool.
My comment however is that isn't this just moving from needing to replace batteries to needing to fuel the tiny generators?

[Ken Sheldon @ Sep 19th 2006 10:54PM]

I remember this article like a year ago. I can't wait for jet powered balsa wood planes!

[Mr. H @ Sep 19th 2006 11:16PM]

I don't know about you, but the balsa wood planes I built would never be able to take that kind of thrust. Hell, they had a hard time with a high pitched prop and a relatively thick rubber band.

[supersocialist @ Sep 19th 2006 10:54PM]

Yeah, but do they come in biodiesel?

[Ernie @ Sep 19th 2006 11:08PM]

So you still need to charge this right?

[... @ Sep 19th 2006 11:10PM]

These have been out forever... I remember researching TINY ones (talking mm on a side) that they were working on in the 6th grade...

In any case, I would love to get my hand on one. You should be able to get a pretty decent sized tank of methanol (or whatever they decided to run them on) to fit in a battery slot...

Me calculates my battery is ~200cc, so if you can fill 1/2 of that with methanol you have 100ml, or 3 moles, or about 2MJ of energy. If you get 20% efficiency (wishful thinking, but I certainly hope that my battery is putting out considerably less than 50W...) that is 400KJ, or about 1hour of battery life running at 10W (which is less than what most laptops are using now)... But then again if they managed 80% efficiency that is a cool 4hours, and if they managed to get 80% of the available battery space used that boosts it to almost 6hours XD

But the best part is that the time wouldn't be cut in half after a year of use :) I wonder what the lifetime on these things is...

[Gilbert Tang @ Sep 20th 2006 12:25AM]

Six minutes, according to O' Captain my Captain.

[Victor @ Sep 19th 2006 11:21PM]

This is by far a mechanical masterpiece. To think that something so small can spin so fast, shoot, eight of those and I'll have a gas powered laptop, lol. I see it being field useful, but never in an urban enviroment

[Alex @ Sep 19th 2006 11:36PM]

Last time I checked, gasoline was also flammable.

[skmetal7 @ Sep 19th 2006 11:50PM]

I've seen this on a history channel documentation about turbine engines, a few years ago. They were working on a version that would spin up to about a quarter of million rpms if i remember correctly. i dont know how good these would be on gas, but where does all that heat go? along with the heat from the notebook, things can get mighty toasty

[Y1n_X1 @ Sep 20th 2006 12:03AM]

Is it me or is this actually a step backward? I wouldn't want to run my laptop on gas, hydrogen maybe, but not gas.

[basline @ Sep 20th 2006 12:24AM]

gas-turbine is a type of technology (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_turbine), it doesn't mean the turbine must be turned by combustion of gasoline(petrol) it could be designed to be powered by any number of fuels. its definetly not a step backward, its a step foward albeit with limited applications.

[Y1n_X1 @ Sep 20th 2006 12:48AM]

I apologize for my ignorance, definitely an impressive accomplishment

[Ari Moshe @ Sep 20th 2006 1:07AM]

What happened to the post about how Xbox 360 is going to get 1080p hd dvd player and possibly game support?

[Kevin K @ Sep 20th 2006 1:09AM]

WOW. What a stupid invention, we seem to be going backwards here...
Gasoline should be going the way of the dinosaur to which it came from or we're all going to be dying from air poisioning and global flodding, heating and the like sooner than we think.

[NeoteriX @ Sep 20th 2006 1:13AM]

Um... I don't think this thing necessarily uses "gasoline" when they say "gas-turbine" but I could be wrong.

[Zallman @ Sep 20th 2006 1:26AM]

testing new comment system.. sorry!

[leo @ Sep 20th 2006 1:45AM]

im curious why engadget reports about this now. i read about an article in MIT Tech review about these things a little over a year ago i believe

[Intrepid @ Sep 20th 2006 2:06AM]

If they really are thinking that gas is a good alternative to betteries, then why are these kids at MIT? Shouldn't they be working at BP, Shell or Caltex? Stupid kids.
We need energies that don't produce CO2 and crap like that. Why not spend your parents college dollars learning how to make things that are environmentally friendly?

[Scabies @ Sep 20th 2006 2:23AM]

I read about someone making a gas powered laptop battery that was the size of a lappy cradle/dock. But really, we have enough batteries lighting on fire, lets NOT add volatile materials, mmk?

(also, supplant is a word. It means replace or take place of)

/end comment_test

[Edwardo @ Sep 20th 2006 8:14AM]

I'm just pleased to see another new technology requiring fossil fuels and giving old global warming another helping hand.

Really I am.

[JD @ Sep 20th 2006 8:58AM]

Just think of how convenient this will be if they can fuel them using methane. Have a couple chili dogs for dinner and work with fully power the rest of the evening.

[k3n85 @ Sep 20th 2006 10:26AM]

This would be amazing

[macona @ Sep 20th 2006 11:59AM]

Yes, this is gas powered, NOT gasoline powered. Gasoline would be way to impure to run in one of these. Look at methanol or methane as a fuel source. Maybe even something like propane or butane would work as well. I wonder if hydrogen would work?

I bet you expell more CO2 than this thing does.

Heres an article from nearly two years ago on these turbines from New Scientist:

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6559

[nick @ Sep 20th 2006 12:57PM]

No, this is nothing new. The army will be happy about it being "finished", as they have sunk millions into this project which has gone way over budget and past its schedule. The MIT team has been working on this forever, and its so absurdly complex that i'd be surprised if it ever worked. And even if they do get a single working device, you won't see it in your ipod for a long, long time.

[Joel @ Sep 21st 2006 1:02PM]

So instead of exploding batteries...