World’s smallest petrol engine



Is this amazing or What??

SMALLEST PETROL ENGINE

SCIENTISTS have built the smallest petrol engine, tiny enough to power a
WATCH. The mini-motor,
which runs for two years on a single squirt of lighter fuel, is set to
revolutionize world technology. It produces 700 times more energy than a
conventional battery despite being less than a centimeter long not even
half an inch. It could be used to operate laptops and mobile phones for
months doing away with the need for recharging. Experts believe it could be
phasing out batteries in such items within just six years.

The engine, minute enough to be balanced on a fingertip, has been produced
by engineers at the
University of Birmingham . Dry Kyle Jiang, lead investigator from the
Department of Mechanical
Engineering, said: "We are looking at an industrial revolution happening in
peoples' pockets. "The breakthrough is an enormous step forward. "Devices
which need re-charging or new batteries are a problem but in six years will
be a thing of the past."

Other applications for the engine could include medical and military uses,
such as running heart pacemakers or mini reconnaissance robots. At present,
charging an ordinary battery to deliver one unit of energy involves putting
2,000 units into it. The little engine, because energy is produced locally,
is far more effective.

One of the main problems faced by engineers who have tried to produce micro
motors in the past has been the levels of heat produced. The engines got so
hot they burned themselves out and could not be re-used. The Birmingham
team overcame this by using heat-resistant materials such as ceramic and
silicon carbide. Professor Graham Davies, head of the university's
engineering school,
said: "We've brought together all the engineering disciplines, materials,
chemical engineering, civil engineering, and mechanical engineering. "What
better place to have the second industrial revolution in nano-technology
than where the first took place, in the heart of the West Midlands.

Batteries are such a poor source of energy. That's why it takes a 300 lb battery to power a car for 40 miles and why most laptop batteries usually expire after 2 years. They don't like the cold and they hate the heat. They require toxic chemicals in order to operate but since they expire so quickly they're not Eco-friendly at all. The electrical energy they produced can't even be directly used, it must first be converted into DC current for most electronics to operate off of it. The sooner they replace batteries the better.

A military electrician.

and the one thing that the eco hippies always seem to forget is that the power has to come from somewhere to charge them... usually a coalfired powerstation... huge inefficiencies to charge them, modern day petrol vehicles are actually better.

the only things that are actually good are the hydrogen fuel cells, however harvesting hydrogen and oxygen is not great either.. nor am i too keen to carry around a tank of compressed hydrogen

This story is from back in 2003 though. What ever happened to it?

..can you tune it for a 'faster' watch?

My phone will have an exhaust pipe ? I call shennanigans .Went and looked ..and I pulled this orf a website . disputing the claim .

"A PC uses about 50 watts of power.
Gasoline has energy capacity of 35 MJ/L. A "squirt" I'll define as 1 cm³, and there are 1000 of these in a litre. So a squirt of gasoline would hold 35 kJ of energy. A gas engine is 30% efficient, about, so that is 10 kJ available to power the laptop.

50 watts is 50 J/s
10 kJ / 50 J/s = 200 seconds, or 3 minutes. Hardly the months promised. "

Here are the Radioactive Byproducts
of Depleted Uranium (Uranium-238)

http://www.ccnr.org/gifs/chart_1.gif

The chart given below lists all of the decay products of uranium-238 in their order of appearance. Uranium-238 is also referred to as ''depleted uranium''.
Each radioactive element on the list gives off either alpha radiation or beta radiation -- and sometimes gamma radiation too -- thereby transforming itself into the next element on the list. When uranium ore is extracted from the earth, most of the uranium is removed from the crushed rock during the milling process, but the radioactive decay products are left in the tailings. Thus 85 percent of the radioactivity of the original ore is discarded in the mill tailings.

Depleted uranium remains radioactive for literally billions of years, and over these long periods of time it will continue to produce all of its radioactive decay products; thus depleted uranium actually becomes more radioactive as the centuries and millennia go by because these decay products accumulate.

The horizontal bar beside the name of each decay product indicates the "half life" of that particular substance, measured on a logarithmic scale (each half-inch to the right represents multiplication by a factor of one thousand).

Lead-206, the last element on the list, is not radioactive. It does not decay, and therefore has no half-life.



What is the ''half-life'' of a radioactive element?


The half-life of a radioactive element is the time it takes for half of its atoms to decay into something else. For example, the half-life of radium-226 is 1600 years (as indicated on the chart given above). Therefore, in 1600 years, one gram of radium-226 will turn into half a gram of radium-226 and half a gram of something else (the radioactive decay products of radium). After another 1600 years have elapsed, only a quarter of a gram of the original radium-226 will remain.
The quantity of any radioactive element will diminish by a factor of a thousand (1 000) during the span of 10 half-lives. Thus, in 16 000 years, one gram of radium-226 will decay into a milligram of radium-226 and 999 milligrams of other decay products. Similarly, in 760 000 years, one gram of thorium-230 will be reduced to a milligram (because of the 76 000 year half-life of thorium-230, which is indicated on the chart .

I work in oil and gas and this story is a bit of a pork pie