Thursday, April 24, 2008

AFM images of NE1 designed origami

Since this was just announced at FNANO, I can drop it here. I built this DNA origami structure partially in bed using NanoEngineer-1 which also exported all the strand sequences. Those strands were sent off to IDT and Paul Rothemund was kind enough to mix them up and image them. This is the first time anything designed with NE1 was actually built.




MTF

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

nine hours and it doesn't even turn

I guess I need to up the torque, nice diffusion though...


everyone knows that NE1 is being released on (or about) the 24th, so that wouldn't really be anything to tune in for here, huh? I agree, so it has to be something better then, right?

catching up on the pump

I have a little down time here at FNANO, so I am working on the Ne pump. I finally have an optimal amount of Ne in the bottom chamber so the pump doesn't just blow up.

here it is with the pump casing hidden.

Be sure you tune in Thursday night (or Friday morning) for some major stuff.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

intermission

Looks like I am out of town for the next few days or so. We'll get back to this then. Thanks for the comments though.

Perry! Where have you been?

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

well, maybe I need a tighter tube


If the sleeve is propelled by phonons from the narrow tube, I need to come up with something else. You can see the seem where I split and anchored the tube (a potential problem). Everything to the left is at 200 K and everything to the right, including the sleeve, (maybe another problem) is at 500 K. Plus since this sim is in a vacuum, I would need to ensure there is some physical contact between the two tubes. It doesn't look like there is, and maybe my temp gradient is too steep. I need a nice scale from crazy vibrations pushing to moderate vibrations pushing to minimal vibrations?

A lot of stuff to consider.

right, Jim...no cheating

Jim: "....maybe you can simulate the movement using the temp setting instead of having the "computer" push it."

And thanks! (see comments last post)

I'm working on it. I am using some thermostats to create a temperature differential. From the Nanorex wiki:

"Attaches a Langevin Thermostat to a single selected atom, thereby associating the thermostat to the entire molecule of which the selected atom is a member. The user specifies the temperature (in Kelvin). The Langevin Thermostat is used to set and hold the temperature of a molecule during a simulation run..."

I have to split up the tube into two separate ones. The sim is currently running, I'll post more details later.

still got it...


too much throttle before

carbon nanotube thermo motor-first try

This showed up in one of my aggregators this morning. Looks like temperature changes are being used to move a cnt concentric to another one. In the linked article there is a claim of "... movements along the longer tube can be controlled with a precision of less than the diameter of an atom." Well, just sitting here reading that, I'm a little skeptical, but since I don't have the original paper I can't really be sure* However I can be 100% sure if that claim is true, it would not look anything like this:

I guess I'm a little rusty






*I really need to call the library and find out what's the deal with my online access to the journals; I haven't been able to get to them in a while.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

exploring that old neon pump


Remember this old gem? As far as I know there are not any simulations of it actually pumping, a sound challenge. I wrote a full tutorial on how to build it last fall, but stop short of a sim. However I feel I am particularly qualified to get this to work because I have built pumps that almost pumped, and cnts filled with gas that eventually held together.


Here's a pick with the Ne pool. We'll see how it goes, as always, but the last few months have been crazy, and the next couple of weeks are downright bonkers, so stay tuned.

MTF

planetary gear simulation

It has been a while since I uploaded a huge gif file to slow everything down, so here is an oldy but goody:

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

dna and carbon buckyball for comparison


There you go, Guy. There is a pretty substantial size difference.