Microfabrication of a Silicon Turbopump with Embedded Thermal Isolation for a Rankine MEMS Heat Engine
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This paper presents the fabrication of a silicon MEMS microturbopump with embedded thick thermal isolation, covering the key building blocks to incorporate thermally insulated zones in a multiple wafer stack, and the resulting device. Thermal insulation is a roadblock for the implementation of heat engines at the MEMS scale. To implement the Rankine cycle on a chip, insulation is required to prevent boiling of water in the pump while the turbine is exposed to high temperature vapour flows. To prevent heat from conducting through the silicon rotor, thick glass insulation was embedded into the rotor structure using glass molding and planarization. This composite rotor approach allows us to leverage the capabilities of silicon DRIE, while creating over 100 micron thick glass insulation between the turbine and the pump. Also, in-plane thermal insulation is required between the central pump zone and the surrounding fluid film bearings, fed with steam. This was accomplished by etching deep trenches in silicon to form an array of thin walls, followed by a thermal oxidation step that consumes the silicon walls and closes the trenches to form a deep monolithic oxide zone. These techniques were successfully implemented for the fabrication of a complete MEMS turbopump, which consists of a stack of 4 silicon wafers and one glass wafer, and a total of 18 lithography/etch steps.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".