Show Notes 16 June 2023
Story 1: First Fully 3D-Printed Jet Engine Showcases Designing for Additive Manufacturing Breakthrough
Source: Forbes Story by Carolyn Schwaar
- Today, microturbine engines require complex assembly processes involving many expensive parts, which puts customers directly in the crosshairs of supply chain dependencies, limited availability, and their manufacturers maintaining the right employee expertise to complete assemblies.
- To overcome these challenges, recently Boston-based software company PTC displayed a prototype [proof-of-concept] fully 3D-printed — in one piece —microturbine jet engine at its company product launch event last month.
- The microturbine engine weighs about eight pounds and is 3D printed as a single component all at once, including all rotating and stationary parts.
- A typical microturbine contains upwards of 33 parts that are individually machined and then assembled.
- Although it looks solid from the outside, inside are lattice structures to minimize weight and channels to enable air and fuel flow.
- “There really are no other components required for this engine to function other than the housing,” says Steve Dertien, PTC’s chief technology officer. “Everything else, from the bearings to the seal to the cooling, is designed-in.”
- PTC says this additively printed engine would fire up like any other microturbine engine, although it hasn’t actually been tested in this way.
- As a non-commercial research project, PTC does not plan to sell this particular engine, but there is no shortage of companies looking to make compact turbines more affordable for applications, such as lighter, moderate-sized unmanned aerial vehicles.
- A monolithic, 3D-printed microturbine engine offers the potential to dramatically bring down costs, speed up production, and introduce new efficiencies not possible with traditionally manufactured engines.
- With 3D printing, also called additive manufacturing, there’s no tooling required for molding or machining parts. It eliminates the need to weld or join parts which can introduce weaknesses.
- And there’s also the possibility of on-demand manufacturing on-site since there’s no need to ship any components from elsewhere or have skilled labor on hand.
- The engine took 13 hours to print on a metal laser powder bed fusion 3D printer from EOS (its M300 model) using Inconel as the material.
- Inconel is an extremely strong and heat-resistant metal that’s very difficult to machine so, in traditional manufacturing, it’s often only used for the exhaust parts of a turbine engine.
- Other manufacturers, including California-based Sierra Turbines, are also in pursuit of the monolithic 3D-printed economical and efficient microturbine.
Story 2: Potential Game-changer: In a Hillsboro, Oregon lab, Intel is immersing data center computers in fluids that dissipate heat more effectively than air cooling
Source: Oregonian Newspaper Story by Mike Rogoway
See video here: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/aU6PdMpYmzQ
- Data centers account for approximately 2% of total U.S. electricity consumption, while data center cooling can account for up to 40% of data center energy usage overall.
- Side note – How are data centers typically kept cool? Data centers use large amounts of water for their cooling system, which includes cooling towers, chillers, pumps, piping, heat exchangers/condensers, and computer room air conditioner units. Source: https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatacenter/tip/Data-center-cooling-systems-and-technologies-and-how-they-work
- In fact, the cooling systems in a data center can use as much electricity as the computers themselves.
- To find a new way to dramatically cut the cost of cooling data centers Intel is experimenting with submerging data center computers in a bath of synthetic oil that doesn’t conduct electricity.
- By not conducting electricity, the bath in synthetic oil does not cause the computers to short out. They thrive, in fact, because the fluid absorbs the heat from the computers much better than air does.
- Historic note: Immersion cooling has been around since the 19th century, long before computers, when nonconductive fluids were used to cool early electrical transformers. Supercomputers used immersion cooling as far back as the 1960s, but the technology remained highly specialized.
- Computers can operate in a variety of nonconductive fluids whose properties have various advantages and disadvantages for data center operations.
- Reality check – what we’re talking about is not the world’s first implementation of immersion cooling for data centers. Instead, the key to this news story is the development by Intel of a safer immersion fluid alternative to current solutions in use today.
- For example, one category of immersion cooling today employs liquids that boil from the heat, cool on a coil, and then rain back into the tank when they return to a liquid state.
- This is a very efficient way to cool computers but some of the fluids best suited for it are so-called “forever chemicals,” also known as PFAS, which, unfortunately, have potentially harmful health effects and can persist in nature for many years.
- Side note: Per- and Polyfluorinated Substances (PFAS) are a group of chemicals used to make fluoropolymer coatings and products that resist heat, oil, stains, grease, and water. Fluoropolymer coatings can be in a variety of products. Source: https://www.cdc.gov/biomonitoring/PFAS_FactSheet.html
- In their Hillsboro, Oregon lab, Intel’s engineers are using less hazardous liquids, petrochemicals made by companies like Exxon and Chevron with properties analogous to motor oil.
- The clear fluid looks just like water, flowing gently through the tank that holds the servers, pumped up from underneath and then spilling over the top like an infinity pool for cooling before cycling back through the tank.
- With filtering, Intel says the chemicals it chooses can cool computers for 15 years without having to be replaced.
- Reality check: Skeptics caution that it may be difficult or prohibitively expensive to overhaul existing data centers to adapt to liquid cooling. But advocates of the shift, including Intel, say a transition is imperative to accommodate data centers’ growing thirst for power.
Story 3: AI sculpture based on the works of five art masters on display at Stockholm’s National Museum
Source: TechXplore.com
Link: https://techxplore.com/news/2023-06-ai-statue-michelangelo-sweden.html
See video here: https://youtu.be/A4G4EioJwmk
- Images of the works of five master sculptors, including Michelangelo, Rodin, and Takamura, have been used by Swedish machine engineering group Sandvik to train an artificial intelligence system to design a sculpture dubbed “the Impossible Statue”, now on display at Stockholm’s National Museum of Science and Technology.
- The “impossible” name for this statue relates to the fact that it represents a virtual collaboration or synthesis of the styles of five deceased master sculptors.
- The stainless-steel statue depicts an androgynous person with the lower half of the body covered by a swath of material, holding a bronze globe in one hand.
- The statue measures 150 centimeters (4 feet 11 inches) and weighs 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds).
- The idea was to create a mix of styles from five famed sculptors who each made their mark on their era:
- Michelangelo (Italy 1475-1564),
- Auguste Rodin (France 1840-1917),
- Kathe Kollwitz (Germany 1867-1945),
- Kotaro Takamura (Japan 1883-1956)
- and Augusta Savage (US 1892-1962).
- Visitors will note the muscular body inspired by Michelangelo, and the hand holding the globe inspired by Takamura.
- Sandvik’s engineers trained the AI by feeding it a slew of images of sculptures created by the five artists.
- The software then proposed several images in 2D which it believed reflected key aspects from each of the artists.
- As one of the Sandvik machine engineering group team members noted: “In the end we had 2D images of the sculpture in which we could see the different masters reflected. Then we put these 2D images into 3D modeling,”
Side Note: Who fabricated the statue?
- The statue was fabricated by Sandvik a global, high-tech engineering group based in Stockholm, Sweden.
- Per the company’s announcement: Sandvik’s world-leading metal cutting tools and expertise are used in a wide range of industries, from aerospace to general engineering, automotive and the medical industry.
- The Impossible Statue was made possible through an innovative use of AI modelling and the latest cutting-edge manufacturing solutions. It is crafted from stainless steel and the complexity and precision required to make the statue a reality put Sandvik’s advanced digital manufacturing solutions and cutting tools to the test.
- More on how it was made [see https://www.home.sandvik/en/stories/articles/2023/04/creating-the-impossible-statue/]
- A combination of different AI programs resulted in a 3D mesh model. The mesh consisted of nine million polygons. The mesh model was then converted into a solid model that the team’s CAD and CAM programs could work with.
- After the conversion was achieved, the team started programming the CNC machines using MasterCam software. CNC stands for computer numerical control and these machines play an important role in the manufacturing industry.
- As one of the developers noted: “Originally, we planned to make it in one piece. But we realized that the size made it impossible. We had to adapt the parts to fit our CNC machines, so we sectioned the model into 17 components. Each of these had to be designed and programmed, along with the interfaces between them.”
Story 4: New wearable ultrasound system can monitor deep tissues
Source: Medgadget.com Story by Conn Hastings
Link: https://www.medgadget.com/2023/06/wearable-ultrasound-for-deep-tissue-monitoring.html
See also: A fully integrated wearable ultrasound system to monitor deep tissues in moving subjects. Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-023-01800-0
- Ultrasound imaging (sonography) uses high-frequency sound waves to view inside the body. Because ultrasound images are captured in real-time, they can also show movement of the body’s internal organs as well as blood flowing through the blood vessels. Source: https://www.fda.gov/radiation-emitting-products/medical-imaging/ultrasound-imaging
- Researchers at the University of California San Diego have created a wearable ultrasound system that can monitor deep tissues, as far as 16.5 cm (6.5 inches) below the surface of the body and the device is flexible, allowing good skin contact and comfort during use.
- The team employed a machine learning algorithm to reduce the noise associated with movement, helping to obtain reliable readings while the user goes about their day.
- The sensor can evaluate cardiovascular function in motion. This is important as abnormal values of blood pressure and cardiac output, at rest or during exercise, are hallmarks of heart failure.
- The deep tissue functionality and twelve-hour battery life mean that the wearable is suitable to monitor a variety of useful physiological parameters, including cardiac output, blood pressure, and heart rate.
- For healthy populations, the new University of California San Diego device can measure cardiovascular responses to exercise in real time and thus provide insights into the actual workout intensity exerted by each person, which can guide the formulation of personalized training plans.
- Fun fact: the researchers had originally intended to design a blood pressure monitor but realized that the technology may have greater functionality – including, monitoring cardiac output, arterial stiffness, volume of exhalation of air from the lungs, and more, all of which are essential parameters for daily health care or in-hospital monitoring.