One of the reasons I was excited by 3D printing from the very beginning was because I foresaw that software controlled fabrication would be a perfect match for software optimization, including various kinds of AI.
Once the design is represented in software, the next logical step is to sic machine learning on the case, to not only optimize design, but to generate totally new designs that puny Carbon-based units would never have conceived.
This is the mountain we have to climb, and hundreds of puny monkeys are swarming up that slope! Buildings! Launch pads on the Moon! How about highly optimized rocket motors?
One of the most promising technologies is super optimized heat exchangers (as well as the closely related technology of catalytic reactors). This has become serious demo-fodder for developers, not least because heat exchangers are beautiful as well as useful [1].
Heat exchangers have been around for a long time and live mainly in the guts of our infrastructure. But there is one application that is very much “customer facing”: air conditioning.
And air conditioner is, at heart, just a heat exchanger, designed to push heat from where you don’t want it to somewhere you don’t care about. And, as Prachi Patel notes, AC technology is basically unchanged for many decades.
This summer, Patel reports on developments using AI, bio-inspired designs, and 3D printed metal fabrication. [2] Additive manufacturing can achieve complex designs not possible with other fabrication techniques, and AI can propose and evaluate many designs very rapidly. Since AI has achieved alien, super humanly weird solutions in many domains, we can expect that there could well be a number of really efficient AC designs.
Heat exchangers are the big energy suck in an AC, so a better design will really matter. Ten times better? [2] My guess is that may be possible, though maybe not entirely from redesigning the heat exchange.
One big question is how to manufacture the new designs at scale and low cost. Can 3D printed metal fabrication mass produce components cheap enough to match conventional fabrication? I’m no expert, but my guess is that it can, and if so, that will be really cool.
- Steven Goguelin, Better Heat Exchangers with Additive Manufacturing, in All3DP, August 18, 2021. https://all3dp.com/1/better-heat-exchangers-with-additive-manufacturing/
- Prachi Patel, AI Could Make Air Conditioners 10x Better, in IEEE Spectrum – Artificial Intelligence, August 18, 2022. https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-3d-printing-better-ac
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