Brownian ratchet ratchet will not rotate continuously in one direction but will move randomly back and forth, and therefore will not produce any useful work. The reason is that since the pawl is at the same temperature as the paddle, it will also undergo Brownian motion, "bouncing" up and down. It therefore will intermittently fail by allowing a ratchet tooth to slip backward under the pawl while it is up. Another issue is that when the pawl rests on the sloping face of the tooth, the spring which returns the pawl exerts a sideways force on the tooth which tends to rotate
Brownian motor bias the motion of a particle (like an ion or polypeptide); the result would essentially be diffusion of a particle whose net motion is strongly biased in one direction. The translocation of the particle would only be loosely coupled to hydrolysis of ATP. The dynamics and activity of Brownian motors are current topics of study in theoretical and experimental biophysics. Brownian motors are sometimes modeled using the Fokker-Planck equation or with Monte Carlo methods. Many researchers are presently engaged in understanding how molecular-scale motors operate in environments with non-negligible thermal noise. The thermodynamics of such motors is constrained by the