alt Hacker NewsModern jet engine turbines: each blade a single crystal (2015)
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Asianometry
Gas Turbine Blades and their Heat-Defying Single-Crystal Superalloys (video)
I've always found the pigtail selector to be the coolest part of the process which just uses geometry to "select" a crystal that grows in the correct orientation for the turbine blade.
I suggest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbXbj20351o as suplementarny material.
Efficiency was mentioned a few times, but without any hard numbers. What was the state of the art efficiency over time from a 1940s design to today? Have improvements plateaued or is there still a lot of theoretical gains on the table?
A good article on jet engines: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-its-so-hard-to-bu...
(2015)
"With recent decreases in the price of natural gas..."
Lots of trade secrets there. I wonder how many of them the BigAI companies have already collected.
Apparently turbine blade production is backlogged five years now and a bottleneck on AI data center production because the proposed data centers need more power than the current grid provides so people are trying to use gas turbines to power them but there are only a few places that make the blades.
Boom, the YC backed supersonic plane lot are trying to make their own blades/engines to cash in on the AI rush which should be interesting.
They are a bit vague on how they are doing it:
>Q: What engine parts are you printing for Symphony?...High-Pressure Turbine (HPT) Blades: These blades spin at extremely high speeds, extracting energy from the hot gases
>While these additively-manufactured components won’t fly on the final Symphony engine, they are fully operational and critical to validating the core architecture. On Symphony, these parts will be replaced by ones made from more traditional manufacturing methods.
So I guess 3D printing the prototype? Dunno if they are going to make their own wax casting plant like in the Veritasium video? https://boomsupersonic.com/flyby/turning-powder-into-power-h...