Do You Know How Nanomotors Are Being Built? (Video)

Technology is advancing at an astounding rate, and now scientists are able to create nanomotors! Here's how they are doing it

Technology is advancing at an astounding rate, and now scientists are able to create nanomotors! Here’s how they are doing it.

As technology advances, it continues to get smaller and smaller. If it continues at its current rate, we could have microscopic robots within the next few decades if not sooner.

Engineers in China and Australia have created a double-walled carbon nanotube motor: They published their findings in the journal Nanotechnology, and this could be a big player in future nanodevices. Graphene is a super strong, one-atom thick sheet of carbon atoms. When you roll them into a tiny tube, you get a carbon nanotube.

Carbon nanotubes are exceptionally strong, but when you roll TWO that fit together, the engineers believe they’ve got a nanomotor.

A regular-sized motor runs when a magnetic device is spun inside a tube of electrical wire. The current in the wire creates a magnetic flux which pulls the inner magnet around, running the motor. But trying to recreate this at the nano-level is impossible because engineers simply can’t solder a wire onto the outer tube, and run electricity through it.

This double-walled carbon nanotube motor, scientists believe, works because at the atomic level, the walls interact via a “van der Waals interaction.”

A van der Waals interaction describes how atoms interact with each other due to electrical charge, which makes perfect sense when talking about nano-scale motor engineering. In this case, when the researchers put the two tubes together to these atomic forces caused the inner nanotube to spin!

The next obstacles they needed to figure out was how to control that spin. The researchers messed with the length of the outer tube to change speed, and found the ideal amount of space between the inner and outer tubes to encourage rotation, but temperature was the most important factor in the end.

At 300 Kelvin (27 C/80 F) the amount of kinetic energy or about the temperature of the room they can change the speed of the rotation! Obviously, their goal is to create a temperature-driven motor made of double-walled carbon nanotubes -- so we'll have to wait to see how they figure that aspect out.

But until then, can you think of the potential uses for a micro-scopic motor like this? Brainstorm some ideas by leaving a comment below.