毕业设计（论文）外文资料翻译

学院： 机电工程学院

专业： 机械设计及其自动化

班级： 机械四班

姓名：

学号： 20081349

Microscopic Machines

1 The surgeon picks up a syringe and approaches the man on the operating table. The patient’s coronary arteries are dangerously clogged with fatty deposits, which must be removed to prevent him from suffering a heart attack. The doctor injects a cloudy solution into the vein in the man’s arm. The solution contains thousands of microscopic “robot surgeons”, each equipped with a tiny motor to propel it through the bloodstream, chemical detectors for locating the life-threatening blockages, and miniature scalpels for cutting them away. Within half an hour, the swarms of tiny robots have navigated through the patient’s blood vessels to his heart, located the trouble spots, and sliced the lumpy, yellowish deposits off the artery walls. Normal blood flow has been restored.

2 for the time being, such medical scenarios will have to remain on the technological dream list --- and they may never become reality. No one has built anything remotely like these fictional micro robots. But scientists and engineers in the United States and elsewhere have already made a variety of gears, levers, rotors, and other mechanical parts the size of specks of dust. Such components --- made of the element silicon or of metals or other materials --- may someday be assembled into tiny robots and various other kinds of microscopic machines designed to perform specific functions. These micro machines would be so small that dozens could easily fit inside a sesame seed.

3 The recent advances in the miniaturization of machine parts represent the beginnings of a new branch of engineering, whose practitioners think small --- extremely small. Micro machine technology is still so new that it doesn’t yet have a widely accepted name. Some researchers call it micro engineering, while others refer to it as micro dynamics or micromechanics. Whatever they call their new discipline, these engineers work in a realm where objects are measured in fractions of a millimeter. (One millimeter is about 0.04 inch.) At that scale, a grain of sand looks like a boulder and mechanical principles such as friction, wear, and lubrication take on new, poorly understood meanings.

4 Such factors may present problems that cannot be overcome. If they can be surmounted, however, micro engineering may usher in a revolutionary new machine age. We may see the creation of all kinds of teensy devices combining electronic detectors called sensors with mechanical parts called actuators that do work. In addition to performing microscopic surgery, such micro machines might pump minute amounts of chemicals, focus laser beams in optical computers, and power tiny tools whose uses can only be guessed at for now.

5 A handful of relatively simple micro devices have already made it to the marketplace. Some computer printers, for example, form letters by spraying tiny amounts of ink onto the paper through microscopic nozzles developed by engineers at the International Business Machines (IBM) Research Laboratory in San Jose, Calif. But most currently available micro devices are sensors which react to changes in their environment, for example, by bending under pressure. Engineers at the Honeywell Corporation’s Physical Sciences Center in Bloomington, Minn., have developed micro sensors that measure airflow in the ventilation systems of buildings or in the instruments that hospitals use to monitor patients’ breathing. Other companies have developed tiny sensors for measuring pressure in automobile engines or in the human heart.

6 Meanwhile, researchers are working on various kinds of microscopic actuators that may be perfected in the 1990s. Some of these will perhaps work like minuscule hands or tweezers for manipulating tiny objects, such as individual cells under a microscope.

Miniature pumps and valves are also a possibility and would have a variety of applications. Medical researchers envision an artificial pancreas for treating diabetes that would pump tiny amounts of insulin as needed into the blood stream.

7 Micro engineering came to national attention in June 1988 when electrical engineer Richard Smaller and his colleagues at the University of California’s Berkeley Sensor & Actuator Center announced that they had made a tiny silicon motor, the first electrically powered micro device containing a rotating part. The device’s rotor, the part that spins, was smaller than the width of a human hair. (A human hair is about 0.05 millimeter in diameter.) The cogs of the rotor were the size of red blood cells. When the researchers used static electricity to activate electrodes surrounding the rotor, the rotor began to spin haltingly. Although the movement was crude, and the rotor later jammed, the experiment showed that engineers’ visions of microscopic machines could become reality.

8 The achievement at Berkeley came almost 30 years after researchers first began to think small. In1959. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard P. Feynman predicted that scientists would someday build machines and tools as tiny as dust specks and then use them to manufacture even smaller things. Feynman had no idea how that feat would be accomplished, however, and to many ears his speculations were the widest kind of blue-sky fantasy. But with the coming of the microelectronics revolution in the computer industry in the 1970s, what had been fantasy suddenly seemed like a distinct possibility.

9 The history of the computer industry is a story of constant miniaturization, as engineers learned to cram more and more electronic components into a smaller amount of space. In the 1960s, electronics manufacturers began building complex circuits on fingernail-sized pieces of silicon. By the 1970s, these tiny circuits, which had become known as microchips, contained thousands of elements. Today, a single microchip can hold millions of components.

10 The production of silicon microchips begins with a procedure called microlithography, which involves several steps. First, a large, detailed drawing of the chip is made, and the drawing is photographed. The photographic image is then greatly reduced and imprinted --- usually as a stencil like pattern of metallic lines --- on a glass plate. The finished plate is known as a mask. Next, a palm-sized silicon wafer gets a coat of a photo resist, a plastic material that, when exposed to ultraviolet light, is chemically weakened. When the mask is placed over the coated wafer and exposed to ultraviolet light, the ultraviolet rays that are not blocked by the mask transmit the image of the chip to the wafer. The regions of the photo resist that are weakened by the process are then etched, or eaten away, by solvents or gases. The etching exposes the underlying layer of silicon in a pattern that corresponds to the mask pattern.

11 Once this process has been completed, the engineers usually deposit additional thin films of silicon, metal, or insulating materials onto the exposed silicon pattern and repeat the etching process several more times. In this way, they can build up extremely complicated patterns and structures on the wafer, all no more than a few thousandths of a millimeter thick. Each patterned layer is connected to the next, becoming part of the final device or part of the formation of the next layer.

12 Silicon is an excellent semiconductor, a material that conducts electricity better than insulation’s such as glass but not as well as conductors such as copper. Silicon is an ideal material for electronic microchips because it can be processed together with an insulating material such as silicon dioxide. But silicon also possesses unusual mechanical properties.

13 Although it is brittle and fragile when it is in the form of wafers, at microscopic dimensions silicon’s crystal structure makes it highly resistant to stress. At that scale, it is in fact stronger than steel. Thus, by 1980, some engineers were suggesting the possibility of crafting mechanical devices as well as electronic components from silicon. That idea received a major boost in 1982 from Kurt Peterson, an IBM researcher and now a chief scientist at Lucas/nova Sensor, a micro engineering company in Ferment, Calif. Peterson argued that by adopting and modifying the miniaturization techniques pioneered by the electronics industry, it would be possible to create a variety of micro devices from silicon and mass-produce them. Moreover, he said, silicon’s mechanical and electronic properties made it an ideal material for the production of integrated devices consisting of actuators combined with sensors and other electronic devices.

14 Today, a growing number of researchers in the United States, Europe, and Japan are forging a new area of science and technology. These micro engineering pioneers are showing ever-increasing skill at making miniature parts out of silicon as well as other materials. To make micro parts out of silicon, engineers use standard microlithography along with a variety of chemicals that etch into silicon wafers at different rates and in different directions. By controlling the etching times of these chemicals, or by using a chip on which has been deposited an underlying layer of a chemical-resistant material, engineers can dig out extremely precise microscopic pits or holes and form tiny walls and other structures.

15 Using these etching techniques, researchers have learned to chemically “chisel” around and underneath pre_ patterned gears and rotors to separate them from their base and allow them to move freely. This procedure involves depositing a “sacrificial layer” of a material such as silicon dioxide on the original blank chip and then overlaying it with another silicon layer from which the moving part is to be fashioned. After this “sandwich” is exposed to ultraviolet light projected through the microlithography mask and the silicon layers are etched, chemicals are used to dissolve the sacrificial layer. As that layer dissolves, the rotor, lever, or other part in the upper layer of silicon is liberated. This technique has enabled engineers to create a variety of gears, rotors, sliding mechanisms, and other microscopic devices with moving parts. And because 1,000 or more copies of a device can be etched onto a single silicon wafer, researchers say that it may one day be possible to manufacture micro machines by the tens of thousands at a cost of only a few cents apiece.

16 Although silicon seems likely to remain the primary micro engineering material for some years, some metals also show promise. Several researchers, including electrical engineer Henry Buckle of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, have been scoring successes in using metals such as tungsten and nickel to create micro machine parts. Metal seems to have one big advantage over silicon for many micro machine parts --- structural rigidity. Although silicon is extremely strong at microscopic dimensions, the silicon etching techniques developed so far work well only for thin structures. Most silicon micro machine parts are so thin that they tend to warp from internal stresses. Researchers hope to find ways of making silicon parts thicker, but for now only metal can be made into thick parts.

17 Buckle and his colleagues have made all-metal micro gears that are slightly larger than the silicon gears made in some laboratories. But at a diameter of 0.1 to 0.2 millimeter --- 2 to 4 times the width of a human hair --- they are still smaller than grains of salt. The researcher made the gears using a technique called electroplating. In this procedure, an electric current is used to draw dissolved ions (electrically charged atoms) of nickel or chromium into tiny molds. The molds have been etched into a layer of Plexiglas (a type of hard plastic) on a metal plate. After the metal ions have filled the molds and solidified, a sacrificial layer underneath the Plexiglas is dissolved to free the part.

18 Instead of ultraviolet light, the Buckle team used X-rays generated by an atomic-particle accelerator. These exceptionally powerful and short-wavelength X-rays, directed through a mask, enabled the researchers to etch deep molds with perfectly vertical sides essential for the production of thick parts. Buckle thinks gears and other micro parts made of metal, because they are thicker and stronger, may be better suited for powering drills and other tiny tools than similar parts made of silicon. So far, X-rays have not been widely used in the making of silicon parts because the rays tend to damage the silicon. And there is another reason as well: cost. The use of X- rays, especially those generated by a particle accelerator, to make micro parts is an expensive proposition that may not be commercially practical. Due to these drawbacks, most micro machine engineers are sticking with methods employing ultraviolet light and chemical etching agents.

19 Although micro engineering may indeed herald the beginning of a new machine age, researchers must first solve several fundamental problems. Besides the warping that can make silicon parts curl up like potato chips, there are other difficulties involved with operating in the micro world. In that hidden realm, a fine grain of flour could bring a rotor grinding to a halt --- perhaps with a screech that a nearby flea could hear --- in just a few seconds. In addition, familiar phenomena such as friction, air resistance, electrical charge, wear, and the behavior of fluids must be redefined because their effects are different at microscopic dimensions than in the everyday world. At tiny scales, where the spaces between parts are vanishingly small, standard lubricants can work instead like adhesives. Blood, which to a human surgeon flows freely, might seem like molasses to a robot surgeon that is no bigger than a red blood cell.

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