One of the difficulties of being a CTO (Chief Technology Officer) must be the task of separating the hype from the facts during the crystal-ball-gazing exercise.
Science and technical publications do a good job of alerting such folk to new developments and innovations, but one suspects that often the journalists naively buy into the over-enthusiastic projections of the tech companies marketing departments.
Take the hot topic of 3D printing. If you believe the hype, these machines will soon be whipping up a copy of anything you can draw or photograph, and putting most manufacturers out of business. One example recently reports “A designer, Bastian Schafer, from Airbus Industries has been working on a new concept plane with other Airbus designers that would largely be printed using a hangar-sized 3D printer”. The report cites an article from a Forbes reporter, where a bit more is revealed. There doesn't seem to be any official comment from Airbus. – it seems the designer is a cabin engineer – does he do the seat cushions, one wonders? Is he qualified to do materials stress calculations on airframes?
His speculation on construction techniques is linked to the description of Airbus's (marketing department's?) vision of the aircraft of the future. The technical basis of the article (or lack of it) is further revealed by such statements as “This Airbus concept plane’s bionic structure requires materials that aren’t available yet, such as strong-yet-transparent aluminum for the fuselage, certain biopolymers and other materials strengthened by carbon nano tubes”
Hmm, yes I guess we could all do some pretty incredible things with materials that arent available yet.
And why would you need a hangar-sized printer? Are you going to print the damn plane from tyre contact points up? Including the wiring and hydraulics? So if you need a bigger plane, you just build a bigger printer? Are we to believe the 3D printing enthusiasts assertions and basically throw all we know about materials sciences out the window? No need for specialised manufacturers supplying highly specified materials to strictly controlled standards folks, we have a 3D printer.
In fact when you go looking, it is hard to find 3D printers making anything more complicated than lego blocks. Hype, anyone?
My point is that if you are going to be an innovator, one of the tools you might need is a shovel - for digging out the hard facts.
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