| NanoEngineer-1 Gallery: Neon Pump |
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This design of a neon pump includes two components. The pump casing, which includes a chamber wall with a hollow tube containing the rotor housing, and the rotor itself. In one mode of operation it could serve as a pump (for neon atoms) and in another it could be used to convert neon pressure to drive the rotor, making it a rotary motor.  This NanoEngineer-1 molecular dynamics simulation of the neon pump took over 8 hours to complete on a Dell laptop (Pentium M, 2.0GHz and 1GB RAM). The jiggling of atoms seen in this simulation results from the thermal motion of atoms, not from mechanically induced vibration. Thermal vibration is a natural occuring phenomenon that is visible in dynamical simulations at this scale.
Dr. Drexler provides this description of the pump: The left image shows the chamber wall on the bottom, followed by a tube containing the pump housing; above this is the pump rotor. The right image is a close-up view of the rotor, showing a grooved cylindrical bearing surface at each end, supporting a screw-threaded cylindrical segment in the middle. In operation, rotation of the shaft moves a helical groove past longitudinal grooves inside the pump housing. Only where facing grooves cross is there room for even a small gas molecule, and these crossing points move from one side to the other as the shaft turns. |
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