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The Kneeslider

Doers Builders and Positive People

Micro sized internal combustion engine

By Paul Crowe

Micro internal combustion engineWe keep hearing about how fuel cells can replace batteries, well how about replacing them with little engines? REALLY little, teeny, tiny little engines. Liquid hydrocarbon fuels are really energy dense which is why all of those batteries and fuel cells are having a hard time serving as substitutes since you need a lot more hydrogen or whatever else to make up for a small amount of gasoline.

Building on that idea, these guys at the Cambridge Combustion Research Centre and the Centre for Micro-Engineering and Nanotechnology at the University of Birmingham are developing these incredibly small engines. These engines can last 20 times longer than a battery and have a quick change fuel capsule. Potential uses include medical devices, military equipment, PDAs, notebook computers, mobile phones and toys.

The engines are 5x15x3 mm in size and produce 11.2 watts at 50,000 rpm. Very, very cool.

Thanks, Mark, for the pointer!

Posted on January 12, 2006 Filed Under: Engines, Science frontiers


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Comments

  1. Brinskee says

    January 12, 2006 at 4:20 pm

    This is really just incredible technology. I mean that’s amazing… think of the possibilities!

  2. mark says

    January 12, 2006 at 6:19 pm

    So we’ve seen the motorcycle with 24 (or whatever it was) chainsaw engines… how long till someone builds a motorcycle with 1000 of these? 🙂

  3. aaron says

    January 13, 2006 at 2:45 pm

    very cool, but for a hundred horsepower bike, (at 50K rpm!) you’d need 6660 of these!

  4. Petri Sutinen says

    January 25, 2009 at 6:42 am

    Well, combustion mini-and micromotors ARE future, i think. There are big variety of tasks between 10-300w, including city traffic…
    Think about if half of the cars could be replaced by 2lb weighing miniengine, put in auxliary task in a bicycle. Not a moped any more, truly auxliary bike could be done…

  5. john says

    September 16, 2009 at 7:24 pm

    wow, this is simply amazing, i love reading all the time about technology progressing. I would love to be apart of this. any need for a machinist 😀 i also do SLA and 3D printing :D.

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