Merge materials is the key to machinery technics

Merge materials is the key to machinery technics

The new factory in Derby, where Rolls-Royce makes the turbine blades, is also somewhat unusual. Designers, engineers and production staff are housed under one roof rather than in different buildings or even different countries. They were brought together because Rolls-Royce believes that proximity will lead to a better understanding of each other’s roles and greater inventiveness. That will be crucial in the years to come, says Hamid Mughal, Rolls-Royce’s head of manufacturing engineering: “Product technology is the key to survival, and manufacturing excellence provides one of the biggest opportunities in the future.” That combination, Mr Mughal believes, is the only way to keep coming up with breakthroughs: “Incremental increases won’t do it.”
Much the same thinking can be found at GE. It also makes jet engines and has businesses that include energy, lighting, railways and health care. “It became clear to us a number of years ago that we needed to merge materials research and manufacturing technologies,” says Mr Idelchik, its research chief. New products used to begin with design, proceed to materials selection and then to manufacture. “Now it is done simultaneously.”
One product of these efforts is a new industrial battery. This began with research into making a battery tough enough to be used in a hybrid locomotive. A chemistry based on nickel and salt provided the required energy density and robustness. Yet making it work in the laboratory is one thing, commercialising the tricky processes involved to mass-produce the battery quite another. So GE sets up pilot production lines to learn how to put promising ideas into action before building a factory. Some ideas fail at this stage, others fly.
The battery is one that has taken off. Besides hybrid trains it is also suitable for other hybrid vehicles, such as fork lifts, as well as applications like providing back-up power for data centres and to power telecoms masts in remote places. It will be made in a new $100m facility near Niskayuna so that researchers are on hand to continue development. The battery itself consists of a set of standard cells which go into modules that can be connected together for different applications. The modules take up half the space of an equivalent lead-acid battery, are only about a quarter of the weight, will last for 20 years without servicing and work well in freezing or extremely hot conditions, says Glen Merfeld, in charge of energy-storage systems at GE’s laboratory.