Information integration

We are approaching problems using a singularly focused, categorical, and outdated problem-solving method. This method was not always outdated and as recently as 20 years ago it still made sense. Even though our access to information has dramatically changed during that period, our approach to technology development and problem solving remains the same: minimize the scope of the problem until you isolate something you can control and utilize.

For an example of this let’s look to the power industry. If we look at the technology in this sector we see very singularly focused systems developed under this regime.  Take a combined cycle gas turbine, this technology uses a single fuel (natural gas), to drive a single type of technology (thermal power cycles), to deliver electricity to a single market (shouldering electricity), governed by a single forcing function (the price of electricity).

This is not, per say, a bad technology, but it was developed under a system where the scope of the technology was minimized as much as possible. If you look at the availability of information 20 years ago this approach makes sense. The groups that developed the technology had limited access to published works outside the realm of gas turbines; they had gone to school where they participated in categorical narrowly focused curriculums, and they were led by technical and business experts with experience with the previous generations of the technology.

Under this set of circumstances the only plausible way to develop a technology is by reducing the scope you are willing to consider. If you don’t have access to information about other technology, markets, fuels, etc. you will try to remove them as variables and isolate out a system that you can fully predict and control. In general, these decisions force you to accept increased system complexity in order to reach better system performance at constant (or decreasing) technical scope.

In the last 20 years, the availability of information has increased faster than ever before. Now, with little more than a macbook and an internet connection a resourceful engineer can learn more or less anything they want for free. My wife and I can get in our car and in the time it takes to drive to the whole foods across town I can (sitting in the passenger seat of course) download hourly solar insolation data for Bakersfield CA, search a prominent, but unrelated peer-reviewed journal for articles that may apply to my technology, and read about a new bill incentivizing the use of some new feedstock in my state.

This opens up a new type of development strategy where access to knowledge allows the performance of the system to be increased without continuing down a linear path that inevitably leads to higher cost, higher complexity systems. Under this concept, you accept increased technological scope in order to reach better system performance at a constant (or decreasing) system complexity.

Going back to gas turbines, here is an example. In the 1970s engineers had perfected the use of grain aligned superalloy turbine blades. The technology was near its maximum performance point, but as they say, if you don’t innovate you die. So teams were assembled and plans were made. Under the old paradigm there was really only one option: make better blades. The teams had access to massive amounts of metallurgic information and detailed knowledge of the operating environment inside a gas turbine. 20 years and untold hundreds of millions of dollars later, gas turbines would be equipped with single crystal turbine blades. These blades can reach higher temperatures, operate for longer periods of time, and certainly have paid back the R&D investment that the companies put in to develop them, but they represent a significant increase in the complexity of the manufacturing process and today cost significantly more to cast than conventional parts.

Would a broader technical scope have lead to a better outcome? Single crystal blades enable a 5-10% increase in operating temperature over aligned multi-crystal blades, which translates into less than 5% increase in overall system efficiency. If we were faced with the same problem now with the same budgets and timeframe could we have used our superior access to information to find new fuels, components, markets, or legal and economic forcing functions that allow us to get a similar increase in competitiveness without the added complexity of single crystal casting?

It’s an open question. But given today’s fervor in the micro turbine, hybrid CSP-gas turbine, NOx mitigation, and combined heat and power industries it is plausible that a broadly scoped development strategy would have lead one company to a much more profitable technological leap than single crystal blades.