00:00 Wide
- student working on Go-Cart engine
C.U
Engine in Go-Cart
View
through traction engine of Mechanical Engineering student
C.U.
Fan-belt and belt drive
Student
with hands on Twin Cam, V12 car engine.
Zoom
in to show Micro- Engine positioned on student's thumb nail.
Guide Voice: Engines -
noisy, dirty and big.
Not necessarily!
At the UK's University of Birmingham
engineers have developed tiny engines, only a few millimetres wide,
that could well replace a standard battery.
00:23 (SOT): Dr Michael Ward, Senior
Lecturer in Microsystems Engineering at the University of
Birmingham - "We've designed this engine to be a
replacement for conventional batteries. Most of the products that
we deal with these days are man portable and we all have to slot in
our AA batteries which require changing and manufacturing. Much
better if we could use hydrocarbon energy directly, much like a
cigarette lighter, so that we could use these little engines to run
off cigarette lighter fuel and give us electricity directly,
without having to go through the battery cycle".
00:47 Exteriors,
University of Birmingham, U.K.
Pan
down from University crest to decorative panel on Mech. Engineering
school.
Main
entrance to School of Mechanical Engineering.
Interior,
Laboratory. Technician at Ion Stream Generator
Student
at Microscope, orange lit clean room behind him
Interior,
various GVs, orange lit clean room
Guide Voice: Lead by Dr
Kyle Jiang, Investigators at Birmingham's School of Engineering are
the first to manufacture these engines in a durable, heat resistant
material such as ceramic or silicon carbide. Laboratories like
these will be the engineering plants of the future, producing
micro-engines that have over 300 times more energy than an ordinary
battery and are much lighter and smaller. These new power-supplying
machines could soon be used to charge mobile phones and lap top
computers in a matter of seconds, eliminating the need to recharge
them frequently.
01:27 (SOT): Dr Michael Ward
- "You have to put in something like two thousand
units of energy to make a battery and yet you'll only ever recover
one unit of energy when you're charging it and discharging it. So
if our little engines can work within that frame, we could be a
thousand times better off".
01:42 Detail
of Ion Stream generator, pan left to reveal operator
Pan
up from hand on computer mouse to computer screen
Technician
at microscope in control room between laboratory and clean room
Guide Voice: Micro-engines
have a wide range of potential applications - they could be used
during military operations for driving micro air vehicles and
micro-robots for reconnaissance purposes; communications relays;
micro-cameras and other sensor carriers. Other applications will
include micro-factories - tiny 'labs-on-a-chip' that will be able
to make drugs, chemicals or small mechanical components.
02:07 (SOT): Dr Michael Ward
- "This technology has got a tremendous future.
If we just concentrate on this project, micro engine at the moment,
we can see that it's going to impact a whole variety of commercial
electronic products - mobile phones, MP3 players, all will become
more energy efficient, have longer operating lifetimes, generally
be much more convenient to use. The impact that we're going to see
from micro engineering in a more general way is going to be even
bigger. We have the ubiquitous silicone chip that we see in
virtually everything. You're going to see micro engineering
everywhere because now, with this technology, we're giving the
silicon chip its eyes, its ears, it - the ability to generate
power, dispense drugs - a very big future for this
technology".
02:56 (SOT): Professor Graham
Davies, Head of the School of Engineering, University of Birmingham
- "At the University of Birmingham we've actually
pioneered the whole area of inter-disciplinarity in the school of
engineering. We've brought together all the engineering
disciplines, both materials, chemical engineering, civil
engineering, mechanical engineering, all together, to work in an
inter-disciplinary fashion. And that's where we're beginning to see
the fruits of that. And we've extended it much further than that,
as part of the new school of engineering at Birmingham. Er we've
encouraged working with the school of medicine, with the school of
bio sciences, with chemis.. chemical sciences and, and with
physics. And I think we're beginning to see the er, the rewards
from, from that early investment in inter-disciplinarity. And also,
what better place to have the second industrial revolution, in
nano- technology, than where the first took place, in the heart of
the West Midlands in Birmingham itself."
03:49 End
of cut item
