Micro jet engines will change human civilization 
Lara Mohani, Special Correspondent
October 22, 2004

We are on the verge of embarking on a new technology based on micro-jet-engines. This will change the way our military operate, the way we energize our hand held devices like cell phones, torches, laptops and the way many other finer parts of our human civilization works.

Get set for some jetting mobile phones, as engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have deciphered a technique to produce miniaturised jet engine-based generators from a single stack of bonded silicon wafers, which could one day power mobile electronic devices. By spinning a tiny magnet above a mesh of interleaved coils etched into a wafer, David Arnold and Mark Allen have succeeded in building the first silicon-compatible device capable of converting mechanical energy into usable amounts of electrical energy. The key advantage of these micro-engines is that they pack in at least 10 times more energy per volume of fuel than conventional lithium batteries, take up less space and work more smoothly than the much-touted fuel cells. "Jet engines are remarkable pieces of equipment in terms of efficiency. For the first time we have got macro-sized amounts of energy from a micro-scale device," Stuart Jacobson at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US, who collaborates with Arnold and Allen, was quoted by the News Scientist as saying. The most apt usage of these micro-engines would be for the armies, which generally rely on battery-powered laptops, night-vision goggles and GPS systems "The army has a tremendous power problem soldiers get bogged down by their batteries," Jacobson added.