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Off Topic => Engineering => Topic started by: Stormbringer on October 21, 2005, 02:35:11 am
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The World's Smallest Car
By LiveScience Staff
http://www.livescience.com/technology/051020_nanocar.html
posted: 20 October 2005
05:43 pm ET
Using the parts inside a single molecule, scientists have constructed the world's smallest car. It has a chassis, axles and a pivoting suspension. The wheels are buckyballs, spheres of pure carbon containing 60 atoms apiece.
It'd be a real squeeze to take it for a spin, however.
The whole car is no more than 4 nanometers across. That's slightly wider than a strand of DNA. A human hair is about 80,000 nanometers thick.
Other groups have made car-shaped nanoscale objects. But this is the first one that rolls "on four wheels in a direction perpendicular to its axles," the researchers reported Thursday.
What's the point? Nanotrucks, of course.
Eventually the researchers want to build tiny trucks that could carry atoms and molecules around in miniature factories.
"We'd eventually like to move objects and do work in a controlled fashion on the molecular scale, and these vehicles are great test beds for that," said James Tour, a Rice University research who co-led the work. "They're helping us learn the ground rules."
The setup will be detailed in an upcoming issue of the journal Nano Letters.
The scientists had to use "scanning tunneling microscopy" to see the thing and prove that it rolls like a car.
"It's fairly easy to build nanoscale objects that slide around on a surface," said Tour's colleague Kevin Kelly. "Proving that we were rolling – not slipping and sliding – was one of the most difficult parts of this project."
So just how do you make a nanocar go?
At room temperature, strong electrical bonds hold the buckyball wheels tightly against the gold, but heating to about 200 degrees Celsius frees them to roll.
The breakthrough is one of many recent successes in the world of the very small:
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The next thing you know the EPA will want them to put catalytic converters on them .:D
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The next thing you know the EPA will want them to put catalytic converters on them .:D
Well, they are carbon... :lol:
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is it just me or does it seem like making microscopic cars seem like an immense waste of time and money?
I would think they would test the technology on something that can end up being useful in and of itself.
Perhaps by constructing the world's smallest microprocessor and running Windows on a PC the size of a wrist watch.
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not really, doing stuff this small is really hard as intermolecular forces are much stronger on the nano scale. The idea behind doing these nano "cars" and nano "walkers" is to learn and be abe to apply these techniques to somehting that would be useful. In essence the buiding blocks
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"baby steps" as it were... yeah, I see that, guess my fuse is short today :-[