Brownian ratchet a heat bath in that they undergo random Brownian motion with a mean kinetic energy that is determined by the temperature. The device is imagined as being small enough that the impulse from a single molecular collision can turn the paddle. Although such collisions would tend to turn the rod in either direction with equal probability, the pawl allows the ratchet to rotate in one direction only. The net effect of many such random collisions would seem to be that the ratchet rotates continuously in that direction. The ratchet's motion then can be used to do work on other systems,
Brownian motion left then after "N" collisions the particle's velocity will have changed by Δ"V"(2"N" − "N"). The multiplicity is then simply given by: and the total number of possible states is given by 2. Therefore, the probability of the particle being hit from the right "N" times is: As a result of its simplicity, Smoluchowski's 1D model can only qualitatively describe Brownian motion. For a realistic particle undergoing Brownian motion in a fluid many of the assumptions cannot be made. For example, the assumption that on average occurs an equal number of collisions from the right as from the left falls