Nanorex, Inc. - Drexler Planetary Gear added to NanoEngineer-1 Gallery

Drexler Planetary Gear added to NanoEngineer-1 Gallery

One of the first successful molecular dynamics simulations of the Mark III(k), a molecular planetary gear designed by Dr. K. Eric Drexler, was recently completed and added to the NanoEngineer-1 Gallery.

The Mark III(k) gear is the result of multiple design iterations by Dr. Drexler, first in the early 1990s while writing the groundbreaking book Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation, and others done more recently. An early version of the gear is illustrated and described in detail on pages 311-312 of his book. That version, referred to as the Mark I, was a collaborative design with Dr. Ralph Merkle while working together at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.

The Mark III series of planetary gear designs exploits symmetry properties involving the sun, planet, and ring gears to ensure smooth rotation. The planet gears have 6-fold symmetry, but in order to satisfy bonding constraints, this changes to 3-fold symmetry where they attach to the planet carrier. In earlier designs, these 3-fold parts interacted with the sun gear strongly enough to push the shaft noticeably off-axis. The Mark III(k) corrects this defect by separating the end of the sun gear from the 3-fold regions of the planet gears, and by making these 3-fold regions somewhat more compact.

The "k" in the name Mark III(k) comes from a series of file names of intermediate designs in the Mark III series, each involving a set of minor modifications, followed by minimization, examination and (until the last) revision.

In between the Mark I and III series was the Mark II. It was the first design that had a closed casing, completed just after the first simulations of the Mark I by William Goddard's group at Cal Tech.

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