Mobile phones powered by jet engines
It sounds like crazy talk to us, but according the the New Scientist, engineers are well on their way to batch producing miniturised jet engine-based generators. These “mîcroengines”, it’s suggested, could be used to power mobile devices such as phones and PDAs. To quote the NS “by spinning a tiny magnet above a mesh of interleaved coils etched into a wafer, David Arnold and Mark Allen of the Georgia Institute of Technology, US, have built the first silicon-compatible device capable of converting mechanical energy – produced by a rotating mîcroturbine – into usable amounts of electrical energy.”
The benefit of a tiny generator like this is that it can produce 10 times more energy than normal batteries on the same amount of fuel. Wonder if the jet engines will also get the miniature equivalent of bird-strike? Gnat-strike maybe.
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