January 24, 2019
TICKLING IVORIES AND FORGING STEEL
How is music like metallurgy? Just ask Marie-Agathe Charpagne, a multitalented Frenchwoman who’s accomplished in both fields. A talented pianist, Charpagne plays about 10 concerts a year, fond of Liszt, Chopin and Debussy. When she’s not performing at a piano bench, Charpagne can be found on a bench in a metallurgy lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara, conducting important research on a special class of hardy metals called superalloys. One in particular, Rene 65, is a special steel developed by GE and the advanced metals company Allegheny Technologies that’s used in LEAP jet engines.
Well played: The LEAP, built by CFM International, a 50/50 joint venture between GE and France’s Safran Aircraft Engines, is a grand example of skill and engineering in its own right. With 3D-printed fuel nozzles and space-age ceramic composites, the engine — designed to power Airbus, Boeing and Comac jets — is 15 percent more fuel-efficient than previous CFM engines. As part of her research, Charpagne discovered a particular mechanism that occurs on a microscopic level during the forging of Rene 65, which will help companies tweak their manufacturing processes to yield stronger and more heat-resistant metals. For her, a love of music fuels passion for scientific work, and vice versa. “All along my life, it’s been science and music,” Charpagne says. “It’s a balance I need to have.”
Read more here about Charpagne’s journey from rural France to metallurgical journals.
SECOND WIND
Wind’s a renewable source, of course — but that’s not the same as being unlimited, according to a fascinating new paper in Nature Energy. It finds that giant turbines at wind farms suck in so much moving air that they can cause detectable decreases in wind speeds as far as 30 miles away, giving the upwind farmer a distinct advantage over the downwind farmer and emphasizing the need for more careful planning. The realization that there’s only so much wind to go around in a given region is also fueling work at GE Research, where lead mechanical engineer Lawrence Cheung has been harnessing the power of modern supercomputers to gain an elaborate understanding of how wind works in the real world. Knowledge like that is increasingly valuable for countries and energy producers seeking the most optimal arrangement of renewable sources of energy.
Not just hot air: Cheung’s latest work can model airflow across a wind farm that spans 5,000 acres (or more than 3,780 football fields). Known as computational fluid dynamics simulations, his supercomputer models break wind farms up into hundreds of millions of individual cubic meters for a granular understanding. His goal isn’t to eliminate the wind-wake problem, but to understand the precise impact of the slower air after it passes through a turbine in different wind farm configurations. That way, the cost of reducing wind wake can be weighed against the price of building farms with more widely spaced turbines. With coordinated wind energy development, everybody win(d)s.
This research will blow you away. Learn more here.
SKILL SHARING
The fourth industrial revolution — that’s the one we’re living through now — is characterized by a fusion of digital, biological and industrial tech: Think autonomous vehicles, nanotechnology, 3D printing and the Internet of Things. But it and other structural changes in the economy will also be characterized by high costs to governments, according to a new report from the World Economic Forum, which warns that the United States will be on the hook for most of the $34 billion needed to reskill 1.4 million workers who could lose their jobs as the economy evolves. The study says the private sector could “only profitably reskill” 25 percent of at-risk workers. “For the rest, at current rates of reskilling time and costs and foregone productivity, it would be more cost-effective for businesses to replace them with workers with the correct skill-set,” the report says. The upside? It’s possible to retrain 95 percent of today’s at-risk workers to ready them for jobs that require similar skills but pay higher wages.
A winning combination: Reskilling and “upskilling” are hot topics right now in the snowy Swiss town of Davos, where the World Economic Forum is holding its annual meeting this week. “The question of who pays for the stranded workers and for the upskilling needed across economies is becoming urgent,” said Saadia Zahidi, WEF managing director and head of the Centre for the New Economy and Society. “In our view, a combination of three investment options needs to be applied: companies working with each other to lower costs; governments and taxpayers taking on the cost as an important societal investment; and governments and business working together.” For their part, WEF partner companies have pledged to reskill 17 million workers around the world.
Learn more about how governments and businesses are (and should be) approaching the future of work here.
— VIDEO OF THE WEEK —
— QUOTE OF THE DAY —
“I was always dreaming. And as soon as you achieve your dreams, you have to think about something bigger.”
— Marie-Agathe Charpagne, pianist and materials scientist
Quote: GE Reports. Image: GE Reports.
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