Apparently turbine blade production is backlogged five years now and a bottleneck on AI data center production because the proposed data centers need more power than the current grid provides so people are trying to use gas turbines to power them but there are only a few places that make the blades.
Boom, the YC backed supersonic plane lot are trying to make their own blades/engines to cash in on the AI rush which should be interesting.
They are a bit vague on how they are doing it:
>Q: What engine parts are you printing for Symphony?...High-Pressure Turbine (HPT) Blades: These blades spin at extremely high speeds, extracting energy from the hot gases
>While these additively-manufactured components won’t fly on the final Symphony engine, they are fully operational and critical to validating the core architecture. On Symphony, these parts will be replaced by ones made from more traditional manufacturing methods.
Titled The Ridiculous Engineering of Jet Engines, this is what everybody should watch first; Veritasium did an excellent job here.
I watched it when it came out and i still am mind-blown with how Physics and Manufacturing Technology come together via "Materials Science" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materials_science) to create unimaginable things. This is what enables and sustains our modern world.
PS: Anybody studying/working in Materials Science please recommend some books/papers for study.
I remember back when I was in university a long while ago all the PhDs had fees except for material science where you could get paid to do one because there was so much demand for the research.
I've always found the pigtail selector to be the coolest part of the process which just uses geometry to "select" a crystal that grows in the correct orientation for the turbine blade.
Efficiency was mentioned a few times, but without any hard numbers. What was the state of the art efficiency over time from a 1940s design to today? Have improvements plateaued or is there still a lot of theoretical gains on the table?
Thermodynamic efficiency (which is what turbine blades enable) has increased from ~30 to 55% over the last 50-60 years. The book estimates that the practical limit of for thermodynamic efficiency is in the 65-70% range.
Natural gas in the US is so cheap, producers have to pay to get rid of it. However there's not enough transport hubs in the US to export it to places that needed it, although several companies have recently announced a pivot from wind energy to natural gas ports. (Wish they'd do both.)
There are many places in US where oil and gas are producted simultaneously (you can not get one without the other). High oil prices stimulate investments in oil exploration and this causes also increased natural gas production. Then if LNG export infrastructure is insuffcient natural gas prices can get into negative region.
"An important feature of tight oil is that both oil and natural gas are present in the same formations and are produced from the same wells."
I think the issue would be mainly that people fail to realize the nature of what they're corresponding with, and take things from inside their heads and behind the walls, and put them into the chat?
No one is "corresponding" trade secrets outside of their company. I recommend reading up on ITAR and the resulting culture it has created around aerospace info.
Note that google cloud has an itar-compatible gemini pro and google drive / docs - so, people do talk to it - and google is of course contractually obligated to not export it, nor to learn from it.
This is very different that AWS fed-gov bedrock thingie - where AWS promises that the models are running on hardware dedicated to you, with no external logging, etc.
> google cloud has an itar-compatible gemini pro and google drive / docs - so, people do talk to it
A lot of aerospace engineering is touch and feel. Someone has a "sense" for when to do the next step, and how to finagle the part so it comes out a particular way. They can train someone, if they apply themselves intently. But they probably couldn't explain it in words if they tried.
Don't forget these companies are both civilian and millitary contractors. These kind of information will stored in separate air-gapped computer systems.
Apparently turbine blade production is backlogged five years now and a bottleneck on AI data center production because the proposed data centers need more power than the current grid provides so people are trying to use gas turbines to power them but there are only a few places that make the blades.
Boom, the YC backed supersonic plane lot are trying to make their own blades/engines to cash in on the AI rush which should be interesting.
They are a bit vague on how they are doing it:
>Q: What engine parts are you printing for Symphony?...High-Pressure Turbine (HPT) Blades: These blades spin at extremely high speeds, extracting energy from the hot gases
>While these additively-manufactured components won’t fly on the final Symphony engine, they are fully operational and critical to validating the core architecture. On Symphony, these parts will be replaced by ones made from more traditional manufacturing methods.
So I guess 3D printing the prototype? Dunno if they are going to make their own wax casting plant like in the Veritasium video? https://boomsupersonic.com/flyby/turning-powder-into-power-h...
Asianometry
Gas Turbine Blades and their Heat-Defying Single-Crystal Superalloys (video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yR5mR-KoNzA
Veritasium https://youtu.be/QtxVdC7pBQM
Titled The Ridiculous Engineering of Jet Engines, this is what everybody should watch first; Veritasium did an excellent job here.
I watched it when it came out and i still am mind-blown with how Physics and Manufacturing Technology come together via "Materials Science" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materials_science) to create unimaginable things. This is what enables and sustains our modern world.
PS: Anybody studying/working in Materials Science please recommend some books/papers for study.
I remember back when I was in university a long while ago all the PhDs had fees except for material science where you could get paid to do one because there was so much demand for the research.
I've always found the pigtail selector to be the coolest part of the process which just uses geometry to "select" a crystal that grows in the correct orientation for the turbine blade.
I suggest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbXbj20351o as suplementarny material.
Efficiency was mentioned a few times, but without any hard numbers. What was the state of the art efficiency over time from a 1940s design to today? Have improvements plateaued or is there still a lot of theoretical gains on the table?
This might be interesting: https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/23490/chapter/6
Thermodynamic efficiency (which is what turbine blades enable) has increased from ~30 to 55% over the last 50-60 years. The book estimates that the practical limit of for thermodynamic efficiency is in the 65-70% range.
Great resource, thanks.
A good article on jet engines: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-its-so-hard-to-bu...
(2015)
"With recent decreases in the price of natural gas..."
https://www.macrotrends.net/2478/natural-gas-prices-historic...
Natural gas in the US is so cheap, producers have to pay to get rid of it. However there's not enough transport hubs in the US to export it to places that needed it, although several companies have recently announced a pivot from wind energy to natural gas ports. (Wish they'd do both.)
There are many places in US where oil and gas are producted simultaneously (you can not get one without the other). High oil prices stimulate investments in oil exploration and this causes also increased natural gas production. Then if LNG export infrastructure is insuffcient natural gas prices can get into negative region.
"An important feature of tight oil is that both oil and natural gas are present in the same formations and are produced from the same wells."
https://www.ucs.org/sites/default/files/attach/2016/05/The-T...
Lots of trade secrets there. I wonder how many of them the BigAI companies have already collected.
Considering most of those trade secrets are sitting in peoples heads or in documentation behind walls AI companies have yet to get over, not many.
I think the issue would be mainly that people fail to realize the nature of what they're corresponding with, and take things from inside their heads and behind the walls, and put them into the chat?
I hope you're right though.
No one is "corresponding" trade secrets outside of their company. I recommend reading up on ITAR and the resulting culture it has created around aerospace info.
Note that google cloud has an itar-compatible gemini pro and google drive / docs - so, people do talk to it - and google is of course contractually obligated to not export it, nor to learn from it.
This is very different that AWS fed-gov bedrock thingie - where AWS promises that the models are running on hardware dedicated to you, with no external logging, etc.
> google cloud has an itar-compatible gemini pro and google drive / docs - so, people do talk to it
A lot of aerospace engineering is touch and feel. Someone has a "sense" for when to do the next step, and how to finagle the part so it comes out a particular way. They can train someone, if they apply themselves intently. But they probably couldn't explain it in words if they tried.
Don't forget these companies are both civilian and millitary contractors. These kind of information will stored in separate air-gapped computer systems.
Employes are required to have background check.
https://suppliers.rolls-royce.com/GSPWeb/ShowProperty?nodePa...
If a company has a specific knowledge advantage regarding the design or manufacture of turbine blades, wouldn’t they patent it?
Patents expire
Patents are difficult to enforce internationally
Where would coke be if the recipe was patented instead of trade secret ?
Can you name a specific example of a trade secret revealed in the article?
I thought they meant it as "lots of trade secrets in the jet engine field" not "lots of trade secrets in the article".