Nanorobots with a spiral motor
The world's smallest propeller will power tiny nanobots
DailyTechInfo based on Gizmag: "World's smallest propeller" may find use on nanobots
Many groups of researchers in various corners of the globe are developing nanobots that will be able to deliver medicines directly to their destination, destroy malignant tumor cells and perform a lot of other useful work for humans. But, in order for nanobots to move inside the human body and carry a certain amount of payload, they need some kind of tiny engine. Currently, several nanomotors of various types have already been developed, but a group of Israeli and German researchers, also working in this direction, managed to create an original nanomotor, which can rightfully be called the smallest propeller in the world.
The shape of the nanopropeller is far from the forms of propellers that we are used to seeing in aircraft. Researchers from the Technion Institute of Technology (Technion-Israel Institute of Technology), Israel, the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems) and the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the University of Stuttgart, Germany, gave their nanomotor the shape of a spiral. This spiral is a twisted thread of quartz and nickel, the width of the spiral is 70 nanometers, and the length is 400 nanometers. Such dimensions make the nanomotor spiral 100 times smaller than the diameter of a human blood cell.
The spiral is not driven by its own motor, it rotates using the energy of a weak rotating magnetic field generated by an external source. The rotation of the spiral creates a thrust that pushes forward itself and the payload attached to it.
To test the efficiency of the developed technology, the researchers placed the nanobot in a special gel, the parameters of which are in many ways similar to the parameters of physiological fluids, which sometimes contain long protein chains. These chains were entangled in the movable elements of other types of nanomotors, preventing their operation, as marine or river algae wound on a propeller prevent the movement of a vessel. But a nanobot with a spiral propeller easily extricated itself from the most difficult situations, easily slipping at maximum speed in the gaps between protein chains.
"The conducted tests have shown that now it is possible to start thinking seriously about the practical application of nanobots equipped with a spiral propeller engine. Using their unique motor system, these nanobots will be able to freely penetrate into the most inaccessible places of the human body, for example, into the brain or into the capillaries of the circulatory system of the retina. And by controlling the external magnetic field, we can control the movement and position of each nanobot with high accuracy," says Peer Fischer, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute.
A description of the nanomotor manufacturing technology developed by the researchers and the results of the tests were published in the latest issue of ACS Nano (Debora Schamel et al., Nanopropellers and Their Operation in Complex Viscoelastic Media).
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