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Pizza tossing art unlocks secrets of tiny motors29 April 2009
Scientists from the Micro/Nanophysics Research Laboratory will use the physics of a perfect pizza toss to design the next generation of micro motors thinner than a human hair. PhD student Daniel (Kuang-Chen) Liu and his supervisors Associate Professor James Friend and Dr Leslie Yeo videotaped a professional pizza tosser at work and then calculated how best to describe the way the dough travels through the air, including how much it rotates, how quickly it spins, its stability and the energy efficiency of the toss. The result is a set of nonlinear differential equations that capture the art of pizza tossing. The model could help design the next generation of standing wave ultrasonic motors (SWUMs) -- tiny motors that could be used for minimally invasive neuro-microsurgery. Their fixed component, the stator, is made to vibrate ultrasonically, and this causes the moveable part, the disc-like rotor, to be "tossed" - both rotated and lifted. "The SWUM works exactly like a pizza chef tossing dough, with the hands representing the vibrating stator of the SWUM and the dough representing the rotor. "The only difference is that a chef tosses dough about once a second, a few tens of centimetres into the air. A SWUM tosses the rotor a few million times a second into the air," Associate Professor Friend said. Associate Professor Friend said scientists had been using trial and error to make variations of the SWUMs but until now there had not been a thorough understanding of the forces involved. View the story and accompanying video of Professor Friend's recent research into Micro Motors and their surgical applications. |
