January 22, 2019
WINDY CITY
The Dutch city of Rotterdam is known for its windmills and cube houses, but it’s about to add another feature to the landscape — a really big one, and one that also knows how to handle a stiff breeze. Last week GE announced plans to install a prototype of the world’s largest wind turbine, the Haliade-X, on the outskirts of the city. Though the machine will be as earthbound as Holland’s famous tulips, engineers will use it to collect data as they prepare to install the Haliade-X in its final destination: It’s an offshore wind turbine designed for marine environs like Europe’s North Sea.
Dutch treat: The Rotterdam prototype, which is being built by GE Renewable Energy and its partner Future Wind, is part of a $400 million investment in the development of the Haliade-X that GE Renewable Energy announced in 2018. The company aims to reduce the cost of offshore wind energy and make it more competitive. With blades stretching 107 meters long, each turbine will be able to generate 12 megawatts — enough to supply 16,000 European homes. “We asked ourselves, ‘What is the biggest rotor we would still feel comfortable with?’” said Vincent Schellings, who leads the Haliade-X’s development team. “Then we pushed ourselves some more.”
Breeze on over here to learn more about the world’s largest wind turbine.
EDISON’S INSIGHT POWERS ON
The late Thomas Edison had never seen a jet engine, but that didn’t stop engineers from using one of his inventions to make them better. While working on his lightbulb, Edison discovered a material that’s making today’s jet engines lighter and more efficient than ever before. That stuff is carbon fiber, which Edison created by scorching thin pieces of bamboo as he searched for a proper filament for his bulbs. His engineers eventually settled on tungsten filament, though, and carbon fiber was largely forgotten until the 1960s, when NASA engineers began looking for a material that’d give them an edge in the space race. Tough and lightweight, carbon fiber composites soon found their way into everything from tennis rackets to Teslas. And at GE, it became a crucial component of airplane engines.
I’m your biggest fan: When GE engineers started to incorporate carbon fiber into jet engine fan blades, it allowed them to shed hundreds of pounds of weight from the fan and build the GE90, the world’s most powerful jet engine, and now the GE9X, the world’s largest. Edison’s little experiment continues to show such promise that carbon fiber — discovered in 1879 — is today as much a material of the future as anything else: GE engineers are exploring its application in wind-turbine blades, riser pipes for the oil and gas industry, and patient tables for X-ray and CT machines that are transparent to radiation and can improve image quality. “Over the next 15 years, you are going to see carbon fiber explode across areas where we have not seen them before,” said Shridhar Nath, who leads the composites lab at GE Research.
What else can carbon fiber do? Learn more here.
WITH 3D PRINTING, LESS IS MORE
The awesome power of 3D printing has allowed GE engineers to build one-third of a new turboprop engine from just about a dozen parts — whereas only a few years ago they required upwards of 800. Also known as additive manufacturing, 3D printing builds parts, layer by layer, by fusing metal powder with lasers or electron beams to the exact specifications of a computer blueprint. Still, when you’re talking about printing industrial parts, you’re talking about a fiendishly complex operation, one that GE Research and GE Additive are seeking to simplify into a one-step process called push-to-print. It incorporates an emerging technology — edge computing.
Laser focus: They are testing computers loaded with machine learning algorithms and hooked up to 3D printers. The idea is that the system will monitor and analyze the printers’ performance in real time, locating flaws and sending instant updates to machine operators. “Through the integration of edge computing, we have given the machine ‘digital eyes’ to track each layer of every build,” says GE Research’s Randy Rausch. “We want the manufacturer to know in real time whether a part build is good or has to be scrapped.”
Learn more about the leading edge of additive manufacturing here.
COOLEST THINGS ON EARTH ?
1. Scientists In Charge
Chemists at Canada’s University of Alberta have made steps toward developing a new kind of lithium-ion battery that uses silicon nanoparticles, rather than graphite, to store 10 times more charge than is currently possible.
2. This Discovery Wasn’t Made In Vein
Elsewhere in Canada, researchers at the University of British Columbia have grown “perfect human blood vessels” in a petri dish. They are hoping to use the organoids to gain a better understanding of diabetes and other conditions that affect the circulatory system.
3. Meteor Showers On Demand
Did you enjoy the recent super blood wolf moon? Soon you might not have to wait for pesky things like the lunar cycle and the orbit of Earth to give you a good light show: A Japanese company has plans to use a satellite, firing projectiles into the atmosphere, to create artificial meteor showers.
Read more about this week’s Coolest Things on Earth here.
— QUOTE OF THE DAY —
“Basically, every point of capacity factor is worth $7 million per 100 megawatts for our customers. That’s a nice upside.”
— Vincent Schellings, leader of the Haliade-X development team
Quote: GE Reports. Image: GE Reports.
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