How macroscale style machinery at the nanoscale outperforms its native scale
There are at least two major contributing factors:
More info on page: Macroscale style machinery at the nanoscale
Contents
Performance boosting factor 1: Same relative deflections across scales
Deflections being scale invariant is one important reason for why macroscale style machinery at the nanoscale works better rather than worse at the nanoscale.
As discussed in applicability of macro 3D printing for nanomachine prototyping:
What we absolutely do not want is to accidentally build a prototype macroscale systems with performance so high that
target nanoscale systems of equal geometry will not be able to replicate that performance.
The result for scaling of relative deflections that are due to machine motions implies that we do not have to fear that.
In fact for us to build a macroscale system that has the same or higher performance than the target nanoscale systems we would have to use materials ...
- with a tensile modulus as high as diamond
- with a density as low as diamond
- with a maximal strain (bendability) in the double digit percentual range.
Such materials simply do not exist today. Ceramics come closest to stiffness but they're totally not elastic.
(Future gem-gum metamaterials might come close.)
That's the 🤯 degree of how much macroscale style machinery at the nanoscale
works better than our good old macroscale machinery at its native macroscale.
A note on relative deflections from thermal motions
Deflections from thrmal motions …
- do not stay the same across scales but grow with shrinking size.
- are especially an issue for mechanosynthesis requiring stiffer geometries to be implemented in this specific application case that is mostly found in nanofactories.
- can still be of issue in crystolecule machinery as too much wobbling can
lead to accidental disassembly events or
lead to an accidental heatpump dissipation mechanism in linear slide bearings.
Performance boosting factor 2: Higher throughput of smaller machinery
And that (factor1) does not even factor in that we can easily afford to go a 100x to a 1000x slower with speeds
by compensating with more nanomachinery (as is possible due to higher throughput of smaller machinery).
This is not an option for the (in comparison extremely voluminous) macromachinery.
Larger distance to resonance frequencies
Beside massively lower friction this also moves operations away very far from any resonances.
Way farther than in macroscale machinery where they are a constant nuisance as a limiting factor.
While the Q-factor of flawless crystolecule can be very high (especially diamond)
and thus potentially exacerbates resonance peaks, this is more than compensated for by
the distance between operations frequencies and resonance frequencies
Here's eyeballed quantitatively how much:
- stiffness and thus speed of sound is high (diamond 12km/s)
- proposed machine operations speeds (assembly) are low ~5mm/s (transport speeds higher)
Related: Optimal sublayernumber for minimal friction
Nice! Isn't it?
This means that taking hard turns and such in assembly in gem-gum factories isn't much of a concern.
(TODO: Argue that this is even the case for continuous motion streaming style processing in Assembly level 1 and the preprocessing steps)
Summary
When comparing
- real (steel based) macro-machinery with
- some kind of hypothetical (impossible) macro-machinery
Hypothetical macro-machinery natured such,
that when (geometry preservingly) scaled down to the nanoscale it would perform
equally or better than gemstone-based nanomachinery ...
Then one can easily spot the degree of
- inferiority of macroscale style machinery at its native macroscale -versus-
- superiority of macroscale style machinery at the nanoscale
Like so:
- steel has less elastic modulus than diamond
- steel has less elasticity than nanoscale flawless diamond (two digit perceptual range)
- steel cannot be moved as slowly as nanoscale machinery as this slowdown would mean impossible mountains of more machinery at the macroscale
Scaling speeds too not just size
When operating nanoscale machinery at macroscale frequencies ~Hz
then (quadratically scaling) dynamic friction losses become exceptionally low
and the (linearly scaling) reciprocative losses are extremely low too (way more dominant).
That would be insufficient for making macro-products in reasonable time though. It may be sufficient for other tasks.
So this is just to state a 1:1 comparison to make the level of nanomechanics outperforming macromechanics even more clear.
Related
- Macroscale style machinery at the nanoscale
- Why larger bearing area of smaller machinery is not a problem
- High performance of gem-gum technology
- Same relative deflections across scales & Lower stiffness of smaller machinery
- Applicability of macro 3D printing for nanomachine prototyping
- Dissipation sharing
A remotely related opportunity to make assembly at the smallest scale mechanosynthesis more efficient than soft nanosystem ever could.
