It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no, it’s Ant-Man?
Ant-man has come alive in the form of a winged microchip. The engineers from Northwestern University have created the smallest man-made flying structure through a “winged microchip.”
The theoretical work was led by experts in bioelectronics Kimberley Querrey and Louis Simpson, Yonggang Huang, and Jan and Marcia Achenbach. These professional engineers built the winged microchip from the concept of a maple leaf’s seed spin.
Nature has a means of letting living organisms survive through conventional methods, including various plants. Maple leaves spin through the air and land on the surface. When the maple leaves’ seeds disperse, they are widely distributed, allowing sedentary plants to propagate over a vast area.
The Northwestern University engineers thought about creating a winged microchip to monitor the environment, track diseases, survey population, and more. This is the primary goal of the smallest-ever flying structure called the “microflier.”
These microfliers has small-scale electronic systems such as power sources, sensors, antennas, and memory data. But what makes this winged microchip interesting is its size, which is the size of a grain of sand. The size is even smaller than a regular-sized ant, making it the smallest man-made electronic flying structure in history.
How it works
The engineers from Northwestern University created a fully functional microchip that flies without an engine or motor. The technology is based on how maple leaf seeds disperse through the air. On the other hand, the winged microchip has propellers that fly like a helicopter. And this is all thanks to the sophisticated aerodynamics designed in nature to let various plants survive.
John A. Rogers, a biomedical engineer professor from Northwestern University, said, “We were able to do that using ideas inspired by the biological world. Over the course of billions of years, nature has designed seeds with very sophisticated aerodynamics. We borrowed those design concepts, adapted them and applied them to electronic circuit platforms.”
Rogers and an entire team of engineers have already experimented with various microfliers. One microflier was created with three wings about the size of an ant. This microflier has an angle similar to that of a tristellateia seed. The team conducted full-scale computational modeling to perfect the microflier to allow air flows and mimic the seed’s natural and controlled rotation.
What the microflier lacks in size, it makes up for in the incredible miniaturized electronic solutions. Northwestern University engineers claim it comprises of two parts: The wings and the millimeter-sized electronic elements. Once the microflier flies through the air, the wings function as a stabilizer that allows the winged microchip to create a slow, rotational motion. Furthermore, the weight of the winged microchip is mainly distributed in the center to prevent the microflier from losing control, allowing it to come crashing and tumbling to the ground.
Inspiration from pop-up books
Another idea that led Rogers’ team to create small-scale flying microchips is due to inspiration from children’s pop-up books. They fabricated precursors in flat, planar geometries. They then integrated these precursors into a stretched rubber substrate. When the rubber substrate is calm, a controlled buckling process causes the wings to pop into precise 3D forms — just like how a children’s pop-up book works.
Rogers and his team are still in the works of perfecting the winged microchip and are also innovating ways to monitor the environment better. The team even included pH sensors into one of these devices to monitor water quality as well as to gauge sun exposure at various wavelengths.
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