Futurehead.com

Engineers have made a tiny engine a few micrometers wide, or roughly the size of a water droplet found in fog.

The device is both confined and powered by a “trap” of laser light, and it sputters a bit. The fact that it works at all, however, may push the boundary of what’s possible in engineering microscopic machines.

“The machine is so small that its motion is hindered by microscopic processes which are of no consequence in the macroworld,” said physicist Clemens Bechinger of the University of Stuttgart in a press release. A study about the microscopic Stirling engine was published Dec. 11 in Nature Physics.

The microengine doesn’t use parts found in traditional Stirling engines, which are super-efficient devices pioneered in 1816 by the Scottish clergyman Robert Stirling. Those use heated gas to push a piston, then draw the piston back as the gas cools. The microengine borrows the same principles of heating and cooling a material to perform work.

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