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Article: Fluidics - computing without electronics.
- Article from:
- Popular Science
- Article date:
- February 1, 1985
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1985 Bonnier Corporation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Ken Hair, a young flight-control engineer with Grumman Aerospace's mechanical-design group, picked two squares of thin stainless-steel sheet from a pegboard on the wall of the lab. The squares, about one-quarter the size of playing cards, bore intrciately shaped perforations. Thirty-odd designs hung on the board.
Hair flexed the squares between his fingers and showed me how they can be stacked to create a solid block or module through which streams of fluids can travel and interact. The patterns from one chip merge with the patterns on a chip stacked below it to create channels for a fluid. "It's a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle," Hair said.
But the ...