The Feynman Plenty of Room at the Bottom motor - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Alex Eisenhut
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 20, 2015, 03:07:28 am
content: I'm gonna guess that many people here would have at least heard about Richard Feynman, if not read all his stuff.His "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" speech about what miniaturization could lead to was given in 1959 with some challenges, one of which was to build a miniature electric motor. Feynman wanted a motor 1/64th of an inch on a side. (1/64th of an inch = 15 mils = 0.4 mm), and someone built it two years later.I've always wondered about that motor and the guy who built it, because there wasn't much info in the Feynman book. Here we goPretty cool.

author: T3sl4co1l
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 20, 2015, 07:50:35 am
content: Neet!Interesting that it's a... planar, almost, so to say? design, and AC. I suppose the rotor is not magnetized, so it depends on induction from the coils.FWIW, magnets and ferromagnetism work just fine at those scales; the finest core memory I think was probably not quite as fine, but bubble memory probably depended on smaller features (although as domains within a crystal, not individual crystals or polycrystalline shapes), and IBM's "Racetrack" research (now since blown over I think?), even finer still. On the ~300nm scale I think it is, ferroelectrics (thus limiting the size of FeRAM) and ferromagnetics stop working as well, then very much at all (decaying to paramagnetism or something like that), because these phenomena depend upon long-range interactions.Induction motors should work right on down to the nanometers, but electrostatic motors are probably much more practical, especially in vacuum. Which is the current state of MEMS devices, for the most part; the main downside being the "sticky" nature of everything at that scale.Tim

author: miguelvp
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 20, 2015, 07:57:06 am
content: Pretty cool, but now they have nano scale motors and you probably need a electron scanning microscope to see it operating

author: Alex Eisenhut
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 20, 2015, 06:26:42 pm
content: Quote from: miguelvp on March 20, 2015, 07:57:06 amThat was already true 20 years ago, as I had to write a paper (or is it called a report in college?) on a subject of my choice in physics and I wrote about nanotechnology, or rather the breathless optimistic K Eric Drexler "The Engines of Creation" version, and I put in some pictures of electrostatic motors.I wonder if I could wind 40 gauge wire as tight as Bill in the video. I'd bet he used micro-manipulators from the biology dudes, but how did he create the armature and the rotor?I'm still waiting for assemblers to create a post-scarcity society...

author: John Coloccia
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 20, 2015, 07:05:55 pm
content: Quote from: T3sl4co1l on March 20, 2015, 07:50:35 amEalier in my career, I worked on a MEMS tunable laser for telecom. Very cool technology, and a touchy little product to make and control. Even just opening the clean room door during certain operations was enough to make the batch of chips drift. We even had to modify the implanter to give us closed loop control of the process.