Currently, Boeing can not replace the 737 with a Carbon Fiber plane because there isn't enough Carbon Fiber produced on earth to keep up with the production line completing three aircraft a day. However, if enough Carbon Fibre could be created to logistically allow Boeing to move away from aluminum I am sure you would see a whole new level of demand for Carbon Fibre. Needless to say, the Carbon Fibre created would need to met Boeing spec, as Carbon Fibre does not have a single global quality standard, unlike aluminum (thank you WWII).
> Carbon Fibre does not have a single global quality standard, unlike aluminum
Carbon fibre also has many more degrees of freedom than aluminium. Not all of these degrees and their interactions, e.g. this arrangement of fibres with some other resin cured at that temperature, are well understood.
Why wouldn't Boeing make their own? They certainly have the money, the experience and the time to invest in such a technology if it is as critical to their success as you suggest.
As this article points out, the new facility in Australia is state of the art. They claim it may produce better carbon fiber than anywhere else. So imagine Boeing made a massive investment in equipment to make their own, only to have someone come along and do better. They make airplanes and let the industry figure out how to make the fiber, that way they can always buy the best if they want to.
Probably doesn't scale as well as aluminium; it'd be a lot more expensive to produce, as carbon fiber is very labor intensive. It's the same reason why Apple isn't likely to switch to ceramic phone bodies - the aluminimum milling facilities are already scaled up to extreme levels, with hundreds if not thousands of machines milling aluminium to keep up with demands.
Boeing has a $6bn contract buying carbon fiber from Toray Industries, a Japanese company. I guess it's a tricky specialist process making the stuff. The 787 has 35 tons of fiber per plane and the 737 uses carbon fiber for the horizontal bit of the tail.
A complicated mix of Trade Secret, Patents, and Domain knowledge are the primary issues. I'm really hoping Boeing/Ford/GM/<big company that manufactures vehicles>/Tesla will buy out a couple of the manufacturers and then open the market up. Sadly because of the aforementioned this is unlikely to happen as it would trigger anti-trust concerns, and AFAIK almost all the best firms are privately held.
Simple because they don't want to. Even carbon fibers being a promise new business to invest, Boeing can just have a better ROI investing in something else.
Not historically. While they have thousands on order, they seemed to have cranked out ~490 planes per year over the last 3 years, averaging 1.34 per day.
I doubt that they are scrapping airframes. My previous statement wasn't accurate, and I understand why it would be questioned. I'd been conflating the airframe construction, part storage, and transfer times with the time it takes to complete a plane.
My opinion though, if the strength is matched if not exceeded of a metal airframe, but weight is I don't know effectively halved or more... less fuel, farther flights, should be cheaper air fare, possibly less maintenance if carbon fibre doesn't have fatigue problems... but the cost.
Operating jets is all about opex, though. Airlines seem to be happy to plough billions into capex purchases as long as the long term total cost of ownership is good in terms of passenger miles.
Less gas is less gas, though! The long term cost is the real question.
As a cyclist, I have a perception of carbon as kinda fragile; take a good hit, and you really need to replace your fork. This makes me think the carbon will mainly be used for internal structure, which would still greatly reduce the weight of the plane (and this the base amount of fuel used), and bring down those lifetime costs. But if it's too fragile, then the overall lifespan of the plane is reduced, which would counterbalance the gains.
I had this impression for a long time as well, because it was true, but it may not be true any more. I can't pull it up right now (at work) but Santa Cruz did a great video comparing the strength of their carbon fiber frames to their aluminum frames, and in all scenarios carbon fiber frames proved the strongest. This included dropping weights on frames and forks, hitting them with hammers, etc... it changed my mind quite a bit about the resilience of carbon fiber.
In the F1 realm, improved fuel efficiency is a fringe benefit of lower weight, high-strength components. Low mass for improved acceleration, braking, and turning, as well as strength and stiffness for handling chassis and aerodynamic loads, are significantly more important than the tenths or hundredths of an mpg you get from not having to push the metal these parts would otherwise be made of around.
To respond to GP, if you can make an aerospace component lighter, once it's made, the thing the component goes on will be better than if it were heavy. Planes have to carry enough fuel to sustain altitude and also to push the plane to the destination. If the plane is lighter, you use less fuel to sustain altitude, saving money every moment the plane's in the air. If you can cut off enough weight, you can tweak the design of the plane itself because it won't need as much lift at speed, making it even more efficient (or faster per unit fuel burned).
If would be far more humane to hike taxes or cut financial aid funding and Medicare/Medicaid in order to pour massive amounts of money in staging giant televised robot prize fights over some atoll in the Pacific.
I grew up dinghy sailing in Maine and some of the more affluent kids would have carbon fibre parts on their dinghies.
I remember going to one of the shipyards (I think Vanguard... I can't recall) and watching them make carbon fibre parts. I was rather shocked how labor intensive it is. Maybe not labor intensive is the right word but it just takes a long time to make a single pole or mast.
If I recall you take long sheets of carbon fibre and wrap around a mold and wait a little bit and then cure it. You have to do this like 40 times.
I am probably missing a bunch of details as I was fairly young but I do remember it takes a long time to make carbon fibre parts.
So even if carbon fibre is produced at scale the molding and producing of actual parts probably has to be sped up as well?
Similar experience, but in Florida. At least for most of the one-design classes, the total weight of the boats and the dimensions of the important parts was set by class rules to pretty narrow tolerances regardless of construction materials.
Of course with better composites you got more stiffness and could also put the weight in the most advantageous position.
Sure, the fiber itself maybe cheap, but processing that fiber into different shapes still costs a fair amount of money. Carbon fiber layup is still a fairly labor intensive and somewhat wasteful process.
Bombardier spent a lot of money in trying to locate the Learjet 85 fuselage lay-up process in Mexico, instead of Belfast in the UK, only to find that the resulting parts were delaminating because the process had been developed for Belfast's climate and sea-level pressure.
Eventually the 85 project was 'suspended', as it remains today. Unfortunately most of the staff at the Querétaro site were laid-off as a result.
Crazy, I would never have imagined climate dependant industrial processes..
That said I just saw a talk yesterday about DNA folding and of course trying to replicate the experiment in a different lab caused a tenth of degree variation which voided the whole thing.
Air conditioning was invented to try and stabilise the climate in factories to make industrial processes stable & less dependent on the external weather conditions. As well as simply stabilising the temperature, humidity also makes a big difference to some processes.
Ireland is a damp place; it doesn’t surprise me that carbon fibre layup didn’t work in the same way in Mexico!
It's a short tale about a sausage factory that moved from an old facility to a brand new state of the factory and discovering their sausages no longer tasted the same, despite using the same ingredients, etc. and how the eventually worked out what the difference was.
We see this in plastic extrusion: ambient temperature and humidity play a measurable role in the product that comes off the line, and the process that gets it there.
Shift in humidity = adjustment in drying of raw material & tweak to drying time as the product comes off the line = variability in total production time, for example.
Surprisingly, as referenced in the Bombardier example, adjusting to ambient environment is often manual/overlooked: it’s trial and error on the manufacturer’s part to make the adjustments necessary.
> Crazy, I would never have imagined climate dependant industrial processes..
Depends on the industry. Some, like semiconductor chip manufacturing, go to extreme lengths. One plank of Intel's success is a strategy to measure everything they can, and calibrate every copy of a factory until they all line up. Don't try to figure out every possible causal connection, just control and copy exactly everything you can measure.
My first job out of school was at a company that was (at the time) famous for electronic test equipment. We found that our competitor's probes, developed in a relatively humid area, would trigger when an engineer so much as flicked a lighter in the same cubicle in our much drier climate.
Climate is one possible reason (as well as coal deposits) for the rise of the wealth and importance of Manchester, UK in the 1800s. There is a damp atmosphere that makes it great for processing cotton.
It's also the where a fairly large printing company has it's central printing facility. Inside the main warehouse over tons of paper a fine mist if intermittently created, keeping the paper malleable. In a less damp environment this misting process might have to be intensified.
Layup is very expensive and labor intensive yes. And most layup methods require expensive jigs.
You also have to use expensive, stiff epoxy resin if you want to have the mechanical properties of carbon fiber. Fiberglass is typically laid up in cheaper polyester resin since glass fiber are stretchier than carbon fiber.
Yes. I thought the article was going to be about layup when it said costs would plummet. Particularly I was thinking of carbon fibre bikes. Looks like this will have no effect on their cost.
To make a bike you need a special mold/jig for each part for each bike size. These cost money to make so to scale out the process is expensive (I.e. to have a lot of workers producing bikes concurrently). With metal tubing you can just make a lot if it and then cut, bend and weld it. Every worker doesn't need an expensive jig. And like you said, just laying up the fibre on a jig is time consuming and manual.
Anyway, they can make extremely light aluminium bikes now with really good ride characteristics and they won't break if you drop them the wrong way!
Are you familar with REAMS? it was supposed to be a better version of Carbon fiber that was a lot easier to layup and did not have to be Autoclaved.
They were going to use it in the Nissan Delta Wing, but i think alot of that fell by the wayside when they elected to use the Monocoque from the Aston Marton AMR-1 rather than a bespoke tub. Never really heard much about it after that.
Carbon fiber can be laid up in polyester resin but it doesn't make sense to not match capabilities between the resin and the reinforcement.
A glass fiber/polyester panel will be no worse than a carbon fiber/polyester panel. So if you choose polyester you'd be a fool to use a reinforcement more expensive than glass fiber.
So as a practical matter, the decision to use carbon fiber reinforcement implies the use of epoxy resin.
The surprise I felt regarding carbon fiber production coming to Australia constituting news in 2017 reminded me of Gibson's law: The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed.
The 2017 Formula 1 season gets underway in Melbourne on March 26[1]. Formula 1 regularly uses some of the most advanced technology[2], and they make heavy use of carbon fibre. Since this was patented, the methods etc. should now be public. So, once the licensing stuff is worked out, F1's carbon fibre suppliers can rework their
The benefit to F1 is in teams being able to apply changes faster, taking lessons learned from Melbourne and applying them as quickly as possible, without having to wait as long as they do now for new parts to be constructed.
> ...without having to wait as long as they do now for new parts to be constructed.
The comment implies that the time it takes for prototype teams to respin is largely driven by the availability of raw materials...I'm simply not following the logic.
Yes, F1 race car composite parts are still largely made by hand (assisted by laser cutters, 3d printers and other high tech). The ability to produce prototypes isn't limited by the availability of raw materials.
That said, an improvement in carbon composite manufacturing could still help them if the amount of manual labor could be reduced.
On occasion, sourcing specialty materials is truly the issue in racing. When race season starts, many fluids, and composite products are sold out for months. Many are very bespoke to racing and aerospace, so lead time may be years. Using our own processes and layup is often as much about availability as function. For F1 budgets, this may be less of an issue.
As a big fan of carbon fibre who used to work for CSIRO (development of scientific document publishing) and now rides to work through Albert Park (on the actual race track, which is a public road around the lake) and can see the huge transformation taking place that is assembly of a F1 race track, this has me doubly excited. So thanks for the links. :)
"The wet spinning line machinery takes a sticky mix of precursor chemicals and turns it into five hundred individual strands of fibre, each thinner than a human hair."
Even if I am willing to believe they are actually counting the strands (could be the case, especially if they are really long), I can't believe that this machine produces exactly 500 in each batch, so I suspect something is missing after "five hundred". "500 micron long strands", "500m of strands a minute" or something like it?
Also, regardless of whether a unit is missing, how does this compare to the competition?
1. I am pretty sure they can count the strands exactly. What happens is that material akin to a tar pitch is extruded through tiny die holes, each hole generating one strand... if there are 500 holes, then 500 strands at a time are produced.
2. Re comparison to competition: I have visited a carbon fibre production plant in France. They use a different process, and do not extrude the fibres on site. Instead they buy polyacrylonitrile (PAN) fibers - these are used in their own right to make "acrylic" cloth, but there they are the raw material. They convert that into carbon fibre with I think tens of thousands of strands at a time. So, 500 strand production line seems to be sub-commercial.
The other answers. Or, it could be 500+/- x %, which might be too detailed for a press release that is likely to get wider spread than "carbon fibre tech press".
Textile industry has already done all kind of thing that can be done on a strand. So I don't think Anything innovative needed here apart from tons of carbon Fiber to do all kinds of things on.
"Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory have demonstrated a production method they estimate will reduce the cost of carbon fiber as much as 50 percent and the energy used in its production by more than 60 percent."
Huh? The actual article is titled "Australia for the first time has the capacity to produce carbon fibre from scratch and at scale, thanks to CSIRO and Deakin University." This seems to be Australia getting its first carbon fiber plant, not a technical breakthrough.
The carbon fiber industry had overcapacity in 2013, but demand is now up a bit.[1] The biggest producer is Toray (Japan), but there are lots of others. Wind turbine blades are starting to use carbon fiber. Automotive isn't yet a volume user, but the fiber industry is struggling to get in the door.
Right now, the limits on using carbon fiber seem to come from the problems in making stuff out of it. The process described in the parent article ends with a spool of thread. As of 2014, that sold for about $20/Kg, which is cheaper than 3D printer filament. Making an auto part out of that cost $80/Kg. Some new technology was supposed to bring the manufacturing cost down.[3] But as of two years ago, the cost of the base material wasn't the limiting factor on use.
You could be right. My completely uneducated guesses would be, in order of likelihood:
- an open patent rather than trade secret means that many manufactuers can make it with the comparitively lower barrier to entry of a patent licence rather than inventing a process internally
- what you said
- Their process is somehow revolutionary (pun not intended) and makes it cheaper to manufacture
If you mean a moonthread through the Earth Moon L1 Lagrange point to stabilize a station there, yes, that's doable. Then you can use electromagnetic cannons to one-shot payloads of lunar materials to that point (coasting up to the gravitational saddle point and coming to rest there with precisely the right velocity.)
You're not far off. Although not a mandatory whole-of-government thing (and hard to stick to when discussing technical issues), the Aus Government research that I know of suggests public comms, ideally, should be pitched at a year 9 reading level.
Hilariously, most drafts I see/do tend to score at the postgrad level.
You're both getting down voted, but as an Australian I think you're both onto something here, quite interesting. Its definitely the case that Australian tech people tend to overly bloviate when it comes to national pride - this article triggered me extensively in that regard. Australians bloviate.
It is written by PR people ("Corporate Communications") not engineers. It is deliberately pitched in a non-technical and self-inflated way, presumably on the assumption that members of the public enjoy a jingoistic self-congratulatory tone. Maybe that is the only way to get that kind of press release into the press.
I must be confused. How are they a patent troll if they actually do the the R&D part of the patent? A patent troll would buy the filed patent and just spend money enforcing it to collect cash...
I am a bit biased because I'm Australian and fully support the CSIRO. They're a non-profit entity[0] - their mandate isn't to make money. The money they do collect from royalties is rolled back into their research.
[0] In that they don't produce a profit for stakeholders. They're a government agency though, not a registered charity.
I'm a big fan of the CSIRO too. But I think it's fair to say that under the current government they've pushed towards a more commercialisation / applied science view of the world. For instance, NICTA (Australia's premier government funded Computer Science research... thingy) has been defunded and merged into CSIRO.
They now operate as 'Data61' on a semi-commercial basis. Again, I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing: I'm actually working with some of the NICTA/Data61 guys on one of their projects, and they are doing a number of these across the APS. If anything, it's been great to unleash these guys on the APS, where IT expertise is sorely lacking. They seem to be very good at what they do (and have a heavy focus on applying machine-learning to real-world problems).
Their new CEO, Larry Marshall actually created a number of US startups centred on lasers/optics (sorry, don't know the proper term) and holds a number of patents in this area. I met the guy when he gave a presentation at my workplace, and this carbon-fibre work is very much in line with the strategy he outlined. He's a decent guy who, IMHO, has been given a pretty unfair run in the press (who have taken a number of his statements out of context and portrayed him as some kind of anti-science luddite). Incidentally, he reads PG's essays :)
I don't really have a point here, just providing some background information in case you find it interesting (and apologies if I sound like a bit of a cheerleader). This shift in CSIRO's focus might have been the one and only thing our idiot government has gotten right over two terms of government (or, at least, the one thing they didn't totally screw up).
EDIT: And just to concur, the assertion that CSIRO is a patent troll doesn't pass the laugh test.
> EDIT: And just to concur, the assertion that CSIRO is a patent troll doesn't pass the laugh test.
Most of the people everyone outside Australia who've heard of CSIRO at all know of them because of what is viewed as a shakedown of WiFi manufacturers. It seems more sad than funny.
It's a shame people have this view. They don't seem very interested in the actual facts of the matter either, judging by the reaction to the other post I made on this topic.
The Arstechnica article was actually a series of two: the first harshly criticising the CSIRO and the second 'clarifying' the first because of the outcry it caused. I thought the Register article was highly relevant because it directly addressed some of the assertions made in the Arstechnica article.
I'm not asserting the Arstechnica article is wrong and the Register article is right. But it's an alternate view from what is, as far as I can tell, an unbiased observer. I'm sorry it doesn't line up with the views that you quite obviously hold, but that's just how life is sometimes. You might also wish to consider whether your dismissal of The Register's assertions is logical, as it basically amounts to:
Other than a vague assertion that that The Register article is 'tabloidish', what in the Register article do you think is untrue? They make pretty specific and easily falsifiable claims (as opposed to the Arstechnica articles), so it's really not that hard to point out where you think they're specifically wrong. Do you have anything of actual substance to add to this?
(none of the below has anything to do with CSIRO, really)
I haven't got the slightest idea why you view The Register's article as being of superior quality to Ars's, regardless of how you stand on the issues, since it's just a small, sarcastic ("Evil Aussie tax on Wi-Fi") attack on what the author views as the weakest parts of what Ars wrote. Even a blogger would put more effort in.
But it seems to me the Register adds a useful, but douchey ("Cisco was scammed!") elaboration on the role of Radiata, sidesteps the question of whether the amount CSIRO was asking was RAND (which is the whole point of everything), and makes some very pathetic attempts to appear balanced in the last two paragraphs. "The hyperbolic statements made by Australia’s science minister and various press should be challenged." But not in this article.
Sorry, but this is crappy writing not worthy of deeper consideration. At least Ars tried to write something.
edit: thanks for really putting the effort in with your reply!
I believe the contention in the WiFi case is whether CSIRO really did do the R&D actually used in WiFi, or if it just happened to get lucky with a patent. Of course, they presumably did vaguely do some sort of R&D in this space given they were awarded a patent themselves, rather than buying it off some other entity, like a patent troll would.
Considering how messed up the patent system can get, it's really confusing how this one instance is where they decide to get worked up about. At least CSIRO seems to do legitimate research in the area, and it is not hunting down small scale players to make them pay up for questionable patents. This is the really abusive part of current patent law, not which research org or corporation gets "blessed" by the patent office.
They are about as far from patent troll as you can get. They're basically a modern-day, government-funded Bell labs in that their mandate is to carry out fundamental scientific research. Their research spans a mind-bogglingly large number of fields including fundamental climate science, agriculture, technology, biology, astronomy, etc. - the list goes on. As one of the other sibling comments suggests, just because their interests overlap with patent trolls doesn't make them one. The very large differences between CSIRO and other patent trolls have been outlined.
Having said that, I'd liked to have seen them handle the wifi case(s) better - I'm not sure I could say how, however. That said, I also believe that they're warranted in their attempts to get some compensation out of the contributions they made that were eventually adopted wholesale across the industry - you'd expect a private organisation to see financial benefit from it and I don't think that's much different if it's government-funded either.
In both that case and this, whether their specific contributions to a developing technology warrant being patentable or not will differ from person to person. I'm sure I don't agree with Stallman on this, for example. I'm not going to try to say it should be one way or another definitively but to paint the CSIRO as a patent troll is a tremendous leap of illogic that requires a fundamental ignorance to what they do. At best, you could claim that their aggressive use of patent litigation doesn't align with how you feel about patents - and I could certainly see why some would feel that way. That's more a question of the role of patents themselves and their scope than a question of the validity of the CSIRO as an organisation, though.
NB: I am Aussie, to the extent that may make me biased given my tax funds this org.
Edit: it's also worth noting that the guy you cited on Reddit is claiming they 'feel like' a patent troll because their website looks similar to Intellectual Ventures' one. He openly admits to being wholly ignorant to who they are and hsvinfno knowledge of their history or purpose.
CSIRO is not a troll, per se, but in court they walk like a troll and talk like a troll. Among other things, they seek royalty payments so big you would think that they had actually invented the whole of 802.11, and they do, in fact, claim that WiFi would not "work" without their inventions. Let's not forget that the standard prescribes a functionality and not an implementation. I say this as someone who has been personally involved in some of the patent litigation being discussed here.
Of course a patent lawyer is going to talk up their claims as much as possible to get a good deal. And patent law is tilted towards the plaintiff to such an extent that it encourages a shotgun approach in order to get something through that will allow them to seek damages. This is why it's hard for courts to sort out legitimate claimants from non-producing entities that are trying to just make a buck from real companies.
The main difference is NPEs target smaller companies and then talk up their claims in the initial phases, then try to settle out of court as quickly as possible so they don't incur alot of expense and can avoid discovery, which is where their patents may get knocked out completely.
Trolls who target small players in the hopes of raking in small settlements all over the place are a real evil, to be sure. But from my perspective working on this sort of litigation for a living, the real threat is actually damages in cases involving standard-essential patents, and that's where the troll line starts to blur.
Plaintiffs like CSIRO may not be trolls, per se, but they use the same hired gun damages experts that the trolls do (like Ocean Tomo). The amount of money they seek is completely untenable in the context of standard essential patents, if only because our phones and computers would cost astronomically more money if everyone holding one of the thousands of allegedly standard-essential patents got the kind of money plaintiffs like CSIRO ask for in these cases.
As an aside, patents don't really get "knocked out" in discovery. They get knocked out by defendants filing IPRs, seeking re-exam by the PTO, and occasionally at trial. It's unbelievably rare for a judge to invalidate a patent on summary judgment (which happens post-discovery).
While the whole WiFi thing is a little weird, CSIRO is a productive research organisation, e.g. Data61 (formerly NICTA, of seL4 fame) is part of it, as are most (all?) of the large telescopes in Australia, including the ASKAP precursor to the Square Kilometre Array.
But having a track record of suing everybody for being the so-called "inventor" of WiFi three years after it was actually standardized, legitimately makes this body a PATENT TROLL. Whether they do fund actual research is irrelevant, as it would be irrelevant for a criminal to claim that he also donate to charity.
I'm guessing its the author's embellishment to drive clicks
they didn't invent wifi, they invented modern wifi
from the horse's mouth, the lawyer representing the company in the relevant case: "CSIRO did not invent the concept of wireless LAN, it just invented the best way of doing it, the best way it's used now throughout the world,"
In addition, it does seem they had a strong desire to make use of their patent, approaching potential partners, and creating spun-off companies, centered around making use of the technology
They patented OFDM, which is the modulation technique that was introduced in 802.11a. They did not invent wifi. They just discovered an effective combination of parameters and patented it before it was adopted. It is not clear to me if the adoption was because of the patent or because of independent discovery.
It's much narrower than that. OFDM has been around since the 1960s. CSIRO didn't invent it.
CSIRO patented its use in WLAN setups (including WiFi).
It's controversial because they're only major first was to implement WLAN setups using OFDM with forward ECC. In any case they were merely taking something already used in cellular phone networks and applying to another kind of broadcast setup.
No they did not patent OFDM, the patented the combination of an OFDM encoding schema and forward ECC, which, in combination allowed effective data transmission in a highly reflective environment. Everything the patent was based on was already known. Patents like this are not for inventing something new but combining some existing things to allow something new.
Actually the patent was filed four years before 802.11 was standardised. From the Ars article:
> The premier world engineering institution, the IEEE, created a working group for the evolving 802.11 wireless standard in 1990, a full three years before CSIRO filed for its key wireless patent. The group voted repeatedly on which way to go forward and produced heaps of records, but CSIRO didn't even participate in the 802.11 committee. The group published the first 802.11 standard in 1997 and CSIRO came forward years after the fact.
The working group was created in 1990, the patent was filed in 1993 and the 802.11 standard first published in 1997.
Long story short: CSIRO did participate in the process through a third party (the first company they licensed their tech to). They also agree to the IEEE's request that they would licence the IP on 'fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms' (note: not free). When they approached vendors and made an initial offer of $4 a pop, vendors refused to pay and ended up in court. Honestly I think wifi vendors simply misjudged the probability of CSIRO taking them to court if they didn't cough up.
It's just unfortunate that the interests of public research institutes often overlaps with those of patent trolls. Previous attempts to reform patent law in the USA have all been defeated partially due to strong opposition and lobbying by major universities.
