Meeting notice: 11-03-98; 7:30 pm.

Until further notice we will meet at the Royal East
(782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner
of Main St. and Mass Ave.


Steven Vetter will lead a discussion about the standing
of nanotech in venture capital circles and other topics
related to getting support for work on NT.

Vetter has founded a NT study group in Minn and a seed
capital firm specializing in NT.  He has been involved
with FI, IMM, the nanotechnology conferences, and a
couple of MNT-precursor start-ups.  He also is CEO of
Computer Solutions Integrators and Products, a systems
engineering consulting firm with about two dozen
employees.

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Recently Martin Schmidt, the incoming director of the
Microsytems Lab, gave an overview of the state of
development of microelectromechanical systems, or MEMS,
the technology Drexler has called "NT on training
wheels". 

Schmidt ran through a long list of applications,
from using arrays of microthrusters to move objects in
space to the possibilities opened by very large sensor
arrays linked by wireless networks and powered by
"energy harvesting", ie, ambient sources. (Those
unfamiliar with this last term might want to click
through to http://www.sainc.com/arpa/energy/cbd_f.htm.
The relevance to nanotechnology should be instantly
apparent.)

He focussed on two cases in particular: massively
parallel distributed manufacture of chemicals and the
microturbine.

Distributed chemical manufacturing means replacing
conventional chemical plants with banks of
microreactors.  There are several advantages, as the
reliance of our own bodies on massively parallel
chemical production suggests:

Changing production rates is easy when the fundamental
production unit makes a few milliliters at a time: you
just switch banks of units in or out of service.
Processes embedded in macro plants are often not so
flexible.

One of the costs of building macro chemical plants is
that several scaling steps are required; each step can
call for its own R&D program. Microreactors require
only one engineering cycle for any and all levels of
production.

Microreactors are easier to control, and in particular
faster to quench, which means that reactions can run
much closer to their optimal production rates and specs
without risk.

Banks of microreactors are easy to ship and should be
easy to assemble.  This suggests that the
transportation of many toxic chemicals might become
unnecessary.

Microreactors naturally complement combinatorial
chemistry and are likely to make that research tool
even more effective.


The microturbine is a very small turbine/generator unit
(about the size of a collar button) that has 20 to 50x
the energy density of chemical batteries.  Over the
last five years the microturbine has become a major
project at the Institute.  It currently employs about
50 people.  Still, despite the intense effort being
invested, development is nowhere near complete; while a
device has been built, the turbine rotor has only been
driven to about 3% of the velocity it will need to work
properly (2 million rpm.)

Schmidt mentioned that the turbine seems to have
anywhere between 20x to 100x the thrust to weight ratio
of conventional helicopter engines, which suggests that
the device might also be an effective propulsion system
for small autonomous aircraft.  

MEMS have the disadvantages that their fab plants are
expensive and their design is highly dependent on
application, which means they lack the generality of
market that allows Intel its large, cost-effective,
production runs.

Thus while one can write quite a long list of
applications in theory, the reality is that most
will go unfilled until and unless someone comes up with
a new fabrication technology.



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