This was designed in NanoEngineer-1 and simulated with GROMACS.
You can see a water molecule being pushed around by Benzyne rings (The gear’s teeth) protruding from a central Carbon nanotube. Fucking Nobel Prize right here. It’s a start.
The case is not hidden, there is none (It was chance, or vdW forces, that the molecule did not slip away). I had actually put together a nice little case of solid diamond, but it had too many atoms and I don’t have time on a supercomputer.
The original CNT Gear was designed by a NASA team consisting of Jie Han, Al Globus and Richard Jaffe in 1997. The other gear was removed, the height was shortened by a few atoms to save computing time, and the ‘initial speed’ setting was changed to 100 GHz.
I was inspired by this post, showing a C60 pump made using one of these gears, or something similar. The simulation was performed at room temperature (300 K), lasted 2500 femtoseconds and took three minutes and seven seconds to complete, each femtosecond taking on average 0.07 seconds to compute. My computer is an AMD Anthlon II X3 445 (3.10 GHz) wiht 4 GB of RAM. The movie played at 30 femtoseconds per second.
The author is indebted to kanzure for ‘sort of maintaining’ this software 
.png){kind=spacer}
