Miniaturization makes room for a new industry to emerge.
“DARPA has always wanted exotic instrumentation to be made smaller and portable,” explains Wei Yang, an engineer at Honeywell, who was recently challenged to design the world’s smallest vacuum pump.
The initial brief came when DARPA wanted to put a mass spectrometry gas analyzer, a device that is typically the size of a refrigerator, on an aircraft.
“We looked at what DARPA wanted, and it came down to making a really small vacuum pump,” explains Yang. Five years in the making, Honeywell finally responded with the smallest vacuum pump in the world.
A microfabricated, turbomolecular pump, the device operates in the mid-vacuum and high-vacuum range, and works like a turbine in reverse. Although it was originally designed for use in the analyzer, further miniaturization will expand its use to applications in mobile phones and other handheld devices.
“The vacuum is a really important part of modern technology,” says Yang, as it is involved in almost every aspect of technology. “It is behind all major progress in modern history, from the discovery of atoms and molecules, down to DNA and computer chips.”
While all these discoveries required a vacuum in the process, these vacuums were large and in a lab. “They could not be moved, much less installed on a small plane or in a phone,” he adds. “A new industry is born once you move a main frame computer into a person’s home, and once again when you put that same computer into a person’s pocket: Miniaturization is powerful.”
Now, with what they claim to be the smallest vacuum in the world, Honeywell has eliminated what they believe to be the last hurdle to a whole class of valuable instrumentation.
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