Episode Summary:
Swedish airplane maker Saab has tested a new application for 3D printing: aircraft battle damage repair. Using a Gripen jet fighter as a test subject, the company has flown an external access panel 3D printed from an engineering grade of nylon, with good results. The company worked from a part scan, rather than a CAD file and hopes to make the process portable for field use in austere conditions.
Energy is also in the news this week. The World Economic Forum is a bellwether institution for the impact of future technology, and they are reporting that artificial intelligence is the inevitable technology for electric grid decarbonization, as systems move away from large central power plants and towards energy consumers who also generate power. According to the report, what’s lacking is a well understood regulatory framework that will allow millions of electricity generators to use national grids as a form of virtual storage battery. Grid scale storage won’t disappear, but real time load and capacity control is coming, whether the world is ready, or not.
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Transcript of this week's show:
Segment 1: Stockholm-based aircraft maker Saab has announced another first for 3D printing: repair panels for battle damaged jet fighters. The company flew a Gripen jet fighter over the companies test base in Linkoping, Sweden with an exterior access panel made using additive manufacturing. Material used was the polyamide resin PA 2200, similar to the familiar nylon. Making parts with additive manufacturing is not in itself new, but what made this test different is that replacement part was made with no 3D computer model of the original component. The existing part was scanned and duplicated by the 3D printer, simulating a forward base, battlefield repair scenario that could be encountered in combat operations. The part was also significant in that it was an aerodynamic surface. Additive manufacturing is used for internal components on the grip and in many other aircraft programs, but it’s rarely seen in structural or aerodynamic applications. The Gripen is considered to be an advanced fourth-generation jet fighter, without the stealth of a fifth-generation aircraft like the F-35, but carrying an advanced suite of electronics for multirole operations and capable of operating without the very large logistics tale needed by fifth-generation fighters. Spare parts availability is a major factor in determining aircraft uptime, and it’s not uncommon for maintenance personnel to cannibalize existing aircraft to keep others flying. Postflight inspection of the 3D printed hatch on the test aircraft showed no problems, and the company is working on a containerized additive manufacturing system that can be easily deployed to forward bases. Next steps will be the development of other materials, including resins optimized for the extremely cold temperatures of high-altitude flight. The system is in line with sobs a sales strategy for the Gripen program, which emphasizes ease of maintenance, fast aircraft turnaround low cost and the ability to use austere bases. Not said by Saab is what this technology implies: by disconnecting the part making process from the need for CAD files or preloaded M code, little would seem to stop Saab from making parts for any aircraft, anywhere. We’ll be watching as this interesting technology develops.
Segment 2: The recent Texas blackouts have thrown a klieg light on power grid resiliency in America and around the world. As the world transitions away from fossil fuels, detractors of clean energy solutions site grid resiliency and supply certainty as serious issues with renewables. The World Economic Forum has been warning and predicting about the economic consequences of handling the transition poorly, and the organization has published a significant review written by Emmanuel Lagarrigue, Executive Vice-President, Chief Innovation Officer at Schneider Electric. Lagarrigue’s paper, put simply, states that any global transition to renewable energy will have to be managed by artificial intelligence. The premise is simple: clean energy in the form of sources like the sun, wind, geothermal and tidal power are decentralized, and generation may occur at the point of demand, or thousands of miles away. Matching supply to demand with current, heavily centralized technologies means speaker plants or throttling of existing generating capacity as system load varies. In a highly decentralized system, where thousands or perhaps millions of energy consumers are also net producers of power at certain times of the day, matching supply and demand isn’t so easy. But that decentralization is happening, he reports. In Australia, 30% of the countries residential, commercial and industrial buildings will be equipped with panels by 2030, and 60% by 2050. In Europe, 36 million solar panels, electric vehicles and energy storage batteries will be tied to their grid by 2025, and 89 million by 2030. One effect of this decentralization is the reduction in size of new power plants. In Europe, median powerplant size has fallen from 800 MW in 2012, to five and 62 MW in 2020, with some analyst predicting a fall to a proximally 30 MW per plant by 2050. With millions of individual consumers also producing power, and feeding it into a common grid, managing supply, load and billing will require higher level monitoring and management then current systems provide. AI is a natural technology for this, but as Lagarrigue notes, there is no legal or regulatory system in place to set rules about how a decentralized system will be managed. For large power utilities, will often revolve very significant long-term debt, the inevitable reduction in revenues as more and more of their customer base generate their own power means an inevitable switch to new sources of revenue. They may arbitrage power by buying at wholesale from individual producers, then reselling with a markup, or they may add fees or tolls for grid connection and the use of their AI enabled management solutions. Other possible model is nationalization of power grid control systems by states, while letting markets determine electricity supply and demand. No matter which model is used, storing energy by using a national grid instead of local battery storage could reduce the cost of entry for homeowners and small-scale power producers, if governments get the rules right.