Nanorex, Inc. - NanoEngineer-1 Gallery: Small Bearing from Nanosystems

NanoEngineer-1 Gallery: Small Bearing from Nanosystems

Name: Small Bearing
Designer: K. Eric Drexler
Date: 1994
Number of components: 2
Number of atoms: 206
Diameter: 1.8 nm
Width: 0.9 nm

This small bearing was designed by K. Eric Drexler and can be found on page 298 of his book Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing and Computation.

This MD simulation of the small bearing is perfect for the beginner. It includes two components and only 206 atoms, so the simulator can spit out fun animations like this one quickly. It is a great way to get some experience using rotary motors in NanoEngineer-1 to drive devices.

The MD simulation you see above took only 2 minutes to complete on my laptop with the following parameters:

frames = 1000
steps per frame = 100
temperature = 300K.

The bearing is displayed in CPK mode and was rendered using POV-Ray. Creating a POV-Ray animiation is easy since NanoEngineer-1 can export the individual POV-Ray files for each frame of an animation.

If you are a NanoEngineer-1 Alpha User, the small bearing can be found in the part libary directory at $NE1/partlib/bearings/SmallBearing.mmp. You will also need to attach a rotary motor to atoms in the inner shaft (torque = 1 nN-nm, speed = 100 GHz) and anchors to the outer sleeve to keep it from moving with the shaft. If you look carefully, you can tell which (hydrogen) atoms in the sleeve have been anchored in the POV-Ray animation.

For step-by-step instructions, take the tutorial "Building the Small Bearing" located in the Tutorials section of the NanoEngineer-1 wiki web site.

The small bearing is also featured in a new video produced by Will Ware and Dr. Eric Drexler. To learn more about the video, read the article "Unmasking the Stroboscopic Illusion - Why the thermal motion shown in standard videos is misleading".

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