The appearance of the smallest winged microchip ever made by man is interesting to discuss. What is the purpose of this flying microchip? So what can this winged microchip do?
Inspired by the way trees like maples disperse their seeds using little more than a breeze, the researchers developed a variety of tiny flying microchips -- not even bigger than a grain of sand.
This flying microchip or 'microflier' catches the wind and spins like a helicopter towards the ground. .
Microfliers, designed by a team at Northwestern University in Illinois, can be packed with ultra-miniature technology, including sensors, power sources, antennas for wireless communications, and even embedded memory for data storage.
"Our goal was to add winged flight to small-scale electronic systems, with the idea that this capability would allow us to distribute highly functional mini electronic devices for sensing the environment for contamination monitoring, population surveillance or disease tracking," said John A Rogers, of Northwestern is leading the development of this new device.
The smallest winged microchip sightings ever made by man, no bigger than a grain of sand. Photo: Northwestern University
The team of engineers wanted to design a device that would stay in the air as long as possible with the aim of enabling them to maximize the collection of relevant data.
When the microflier falls through the air, its wings interact with the air to create a slow, steady rotational motion.
"We think that we're beating nature. At least in the narrow sense that we've been able to build structures that fall with a more stable trajectory and at a slower terminal velocity than the equivalent seed you'd see from a plant or tree," Rogers said.
"We were also able to build these helicopter flying structures of much smaller sizes than those found in nature."
Rogers believes the device could potentially be dropped from the sky en masse and dispersed to monitor environmental improvement efforts after an oil spill, or to track air pollution levels at different altitudes.
But there is an irony that this will potentially create new environmental pollutants. Rogers and his team wrote in their paper that efficient methods of disposal should be considered carefully.
One solution to this problem is to manufacture devices made from materials that are naturally absorbed into the environment through chemical reactions and/or physical disintegration into harmless end products. Fortunately, Rogers' laboratory developed transient electronics capable of dissolving in water once they were no longer useful.
"We fabricate such physical transient electronic systems using degradable polymers, compostable conductors, and soluble integrated circuit chips that naturally dissipate into an environmentally friendly final product when exposed to water," Rogers said.
"We recognize that recovering large collections of microfliers may be difficult. To solve this problem, these environmentally absorbable versions dissolve naturally and are harmless," he said. This research has been published in the journal Nature.
