{"id":7015,"date":"2019-10-24T12:55:59","date_gmt":"2019-10-24T07:55:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cawater-info.net\/all_about_water\/en\/?p=7015"},"modified":"2019-10-31T13:00:56","modified_gmt":"2019-10-31T08:00:56","slug":"engineers-have-created-a-computer-that-operates-on-water-droplets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.cawater-info.net\/all_about_water\/en\/?p=7015","title":{"rendered":"Engineers Have Created a Computer That Operates on Water Droplets"},"content":{"rendered":"

Researchers in the US have built a fully functioning computer that runs like clockwork – but instead of electrons, it operates using the movement of tiny magnetised water droplets.\u00a0The ultimate goal is to use the machine to precisely control and manipulate matter, the same way that regular computers manipulate information.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Although this new water-based computer could theoretically do everything a normal computer can thanks to its universal logic gates, it\u2019s much slower than the devices we currently use. But the team has far bigger plans in mind for their invention – revolutionising the way we process and manufacture materials.<\/p>\n

“We already have digital computers to process information \u2026 Our goal is to build a completely new class of computers that can precisely control and manipulate physical matter,” Manu Prakash, lead researcher and bioengineer at Stanford University,\u00a0said in a press release.\u00a0“Imagine if when you run a set of computations that not only information is processed but physical matter is algorithmically manipulated as well. We have just made this possible at the mesoscale [10 microns to 1 millimetre].\u201d<\/p>\n

“In this work, we finally demonstrate a synchronous, universal droplet logic and control,”\u00a0he added.<\/p>\n

Prakash first came up with the idea for the computer nearly a decade ago, but although it was easy enough to work out how to control water droplets – by infusing them with magnetic nanoparticles and moving them around a maze of iron bars – finding a way to synchronise these movements proved challenging.<\/p>\n

In regular computers, this is the role of the clock, which perfectly times every single movement within the system, but Prakash\u2019s team struggled to find something that would do the same thing with water. But then they came up with the idea of a rotating magnetic field.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery time the field flips, the polarity of the bars reverses, drawing the magnetised droplets in a new, predetermined direction, like slot cars on a track,\u201d the Stanford press release explains. \u201cEvery rotation of the field counts as one clock cycle, like a second hand making a full circle on a clock face, and every drop marches exactly one step forward with each cycle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prakash\u2019s team found that this magnetic \u2018clock\u2019 moves the system forward in perfect synchrony, which means that it can run virtually forever without errors. And it carries information using the absence or presence of water droplets as the 1s and 0s of its binary code.<\/p>\n

“Following these rules, we’ve demonstrated that we can make all the universal logic gates used in electronics, simply by changing the layout of the bars on the chip,”\u00a0said co-researcher Georgios Katsikis. “The actual design space in our platform is incredibly rich. Give us any Boolean logic circuit in the world, and we can build it with these little magnetic droplets moving around.”<\/p>\n

Publishing in the journal\u00a0Nature Physics, the team also demonstrated that they could use the system to build a simple-state machine that included 1-bit memory storage.<\/p>\n

The current chips are about half the size of a postage stamp, and the droplets are smaller than poppy seeds, but the team see no reason they can\u2019t keep making the system smaller, as well as adding more drops to make it more complex.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re hoping this will allow them to perform reactions that are currently done in bulk in test tubes with their computer – essentially, each droplet can carry chemicals within it and can become its own perfectly controlled test tube.<\/p>\n

The team is now creating a design tool that lets anyone build their basic system and play around with the design to help take it to the next level.\u00a0\u201cWe are trying to bring the same kind of exponential scale up because of computation we saw in the digital world into the physical world,\u201d\u00a0said Prakash.<\/p>\n

Source:\u00a0https:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n

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