May 28, 2019
A QUANTUM LEAP
Competitive sports events like the long jump require not only strong legs, but also upper-body capabilities — athletes in training, for instance, need to use their hands to grip a bar for squats and other exercises. This was especially a problem for New Zealander Anna Grimaldi, who was born without a right hand, and whose standard prosthetic wasn’t quite up to the task. “My old arm was just an everyday child’s arm attachment, designed to lift a glass of water or a shopping bag,” Grimaldi said. “It wasn’t designed to lift 50 kilograms off the ground.” Nonetheless, Grimaldi took home the gold for New Zealand in the 2016 Paralympics and is now in training for her next world championship — with the help of a tough-as-nails titanium prosthesis built by 3D printer.
Steeled for competition: Grimaldi benefited from the tech savvy of the New Zealand firm Zenith Tecnica, which specializes in a particular kind of 3D printing — electron beam melting. Using printers made by Arcam EBM, part of GE Additive, the company fuses titanium powder layer by layer into a limb that’s strong enough to grab a barbell. (GE uses Arcam machines to print parts for the world’s largest jet engine.) 3D printing allows for the manufacture of customized objects suited to the user’s needs — in this case, Grimaldi’s desire for the gold. She said, “Just to have it personalized made it feel so much more mine, and when I got it on the bar for the first time I actually felt like: Wow, this must be what it feels like to hold a bar in two hands.”
Tech like this was the talk of the town in Detroit last week as industry innovators and experts, including reps from GE Additive, gathered for RAPID + TCT, one of the world’s premier 3D-printing confabs. Keep reading for more on what 3D printing can do, and click here to learn about Grimaldi’s feat.
WORKING LAUNCH
Mankind has been working with copper for 12,000 years, drawn to its malleability and the ease with which it transfers heat and electricity. Cavemen loved it because they could make it into weapons, jewelers love to turn it into bracelets, and chefs know it’s the key to a killer omelet. The many applications of copper, in other words, are not exactly rocket science. Or ... are they? It turns out that scientists from NASA have coveted copper, too, as a material uniquely suited to the needs of a rocket engine. But the old ways of working didn’t allow for this: The process of manufacturing copper parts was slow and costly, and often resulted in varying levels of quality from piece to piece. What was required to truly get this long-beloved material off the ground was a uniquely 21st-century technology: 3D printing.
Blast off: In a rocket engine’s combustion chamber, copper’s ability to smoothly disperse heat meets its match — fuels that burn up to 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to vaporize any material. So NASA engineers Christopher Protz and Paul Gradl turned to 3D printing, designing prototypes in-house and building them on a machine made by Concept Laser, which, like Arcam, is also part of GE Additive. To keep the copper from overheating, engineers designed the combustion chamber with small channels through which they simultaneously pump a coolant, maintaining an equilibrium temperature that won’t damage the engine. Protz and Gradl received financing through a NASA program designed to fund “game-changing ideas” that “have the potential to revolutionize future space missions.”
“Eventually,” Gradl said, “the goal is to make rockets a lot cheaper so we can be flying them more often.” Learn more here about how they’re progressing toward that goal.
PUMP IT UP
In order to incorporate renewable energy sources like wind and solar into the electrical grid of tomorrow, utilities are making use of one of the oldest forces in the universe: gravity. That’s the key to pumped storage hydropower, or PSH, essentially a giant water-based battery that allows utilities to capture renewable energy when it’s plentiful — when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing — for use later, when it’s not. With PSH, some of the excess juice that solar and wind installations generate during the day can be used to pump water uphill into a reservoir. Later on, when demand picks up but generation slows, the water is released, speeding downhill through hydroelectric turbines. Already involved in hydro storage projects around the world, GE announced recently that it’s received a $1.25 million grant from the Department of Energy to further its exploration of the technology in the U.S.
Hot dam! “Can PSH prime the pump to enable more renewables? This is a central question we’re asking as part of our DOE-supported study,” said Yazhou Jiang, a GE Research project leader. “It’s part of a mix of promising storage solutions that are emerging to meet the needs of a fast-changing energy landscape.” Though the technology is practically elemental, GE is also looking at digital tools — similar to the Reservoir, a platform of battery-based energy-storage solutions launched last year — that will optimize the performance of PSH projects.
Learn more here about the promise of hydro storage.
COOLEST THINGS ON EARTH ?
1. Get The Whole Picture
Humans are able to use experience and inference to develop a complex sense of our immediate surroundings, without having to gaze at every single object in our vicinity. Now, AI-trained robots are developing similar skills.
2. Snail’s Pace
A Japanese researcher has demonstrated that a single gene governs the direction of a snail’s coil — whether it grows to the right or left. The discovery could enrich our understanding of human development, too.
3. Bot Who’s Counting?
The factory floors of the future might be swarmed — literally, by small mobile robots designed to work communally like bees in a hive.
Read more about this week’s Coolest Things on Earth here.
— QUOTE OF THE DAY —
“We saw the potential of additive manufacturing, where we can make parts in a matter of days or weeks. That was very exciting to us. And NASA was willing to take risks.”
— Paul Gradl, engineer at NASA
Quote: GE Reports. Image: Getty Images.
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