Stark's artificial heart is at once the source of his power and his greatest limitation. And in the real world, too, mechanical hearts offer people a new lease on life — but they have serious problems.
That's because so many people have heart disease. The World Heart Federation estimates that 17 million deaths around the globe are caused by cardiovascular disease. Surgically implanted mechanical pumps were first designed to be bridge to an eventual heart transplant. But now, ventricular assist devices are seen as equal to a real human heart replacement.
Compared with transplants, these devices offer similar survival rates. But they carry risks, like a higher risk of extreme internal bleeding as a result of the implant. Developing algorithms for analyzing power system equipment required determining what exactly damaged components look like from a variety of angles under disparate lighting conditions.
Here, the software flags problems with equipment used to reduce vibration caused by winds. But one of the most important issues, especially in California, is for our AI to recognize where and when vegetation is growing too close to high-voltage power lines, particularly in combination with faulty components, a dangerous combination in fire country. Today, our system can go through tens of thousands of images and spot issues in a matter of hours and days, compared with months for manual analysis.
This is a huge help for utilities trying to maintain the power infrastructure. But AI isn't just good for analyzing images. AI already does that to predict weather conditions , the growth of companies , and the likelihood of onset of diseases , to name just a few examples. We believe that AI will be able to provide similar predictive tools for power utilities, anticipating faults, and flagging areas where these faults could potentially cause wildfires.
We are developing a system to do so in cooperation with industry and utility partners. We are using historical data from power line inspections combined with historical weather conditions for the relevant region and feeding it to our machine learning systems.
We are asking our machine learning systems to find patterns relating to broken or damaged components, healthy components, and overgrown vegetation around lines, along with the weather conditions related to all of these, and to use the patterns to predict the future health of the power line or electrical components and vegetation growth around them.
Buzz Solutions' PowerAI software analyzes images of the power infrastructure to spot current problems and predict future ones. Right now, our algorithms can predict six months into the future that, for example, there is a likelihood of five insulators getting damaged in a specific area, along with a high likelihood of vegetation overgrowth near the line at that time, that combined create a fire risk.
We are now using this predictive fault detection system in pilot programs with several major utilities—one in New York, one in the New England region, and one in Canada. Since we began our pilots in December of , we have analyzed about 3, electrical towers.
We detected, among some 19, healthy electrical components, 5, faulty ones that could have led to power outages or sparking. We do not have data on repairs or replacements made.
Where do we go from here? To move beyond these pilots and deploy predictive AI more widely, we will need a huge amount of data, collected over time and across various geographies. This requires working with multiple power companies, collaborating with their inspection, maintenance, and vegetation management teams.
Major power utilities in the United States have the budgets and the resources to collect data at such a massive scale with drone and aviation-based inspection programs. But smaller utilities are also becoming able to collect more data as the cost of drones drops. Making tools like ours broadly useful will require collaboration between the big and the small utilities, as well as the drone and sensor technology providers.
Fast forward to October It's not hard to imagine the western U. S facing another hot, dry, and extremely dangerous fire season, during which a small spark could lead to a giant disaster. People who live in fire country are taking care to avoid any activity that could start a fire.
But these days, they are far less worried about the risks from their electric grid, because, months ago, utility workers came through, repairing and replacing faulty insulators, transformers, and other electrical components and trimming back trees, even those that had yet to reach power lines.
Some asked the workers why all the activity. Explore by topic. The reactor pictured, ITER, is under construction and is planned to be the first fusion reactor large enough to produce a net gain of energy.
Basically, it mashes two isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, together at such high energies that they combine into one atom. When they fuse, the reaction produces helium and a free neutron. That energy can be captured as heat to run a traditional steam-driven turbine like any other power plant. So what does the arc reactor's torus donut shape tell us? It means there are charged particles moving in a circle, contained by a magnetic field.
High-energy particles usually have high energy because they're moving very fast, and magnetic fields can curve the motion of charged particles. Curving the particles' motion into a circle keeps them in one place long enough to get them to collide. You may notice that current fusion reactor designs have a lot of magnet coils on the outside of the torus, whereas the Stark Industries arc reactor has a viewing window.
Plasma containment is the single biggest challenge for hot fusion, but the arc reactor makes it look effortless. From this, we can conclude that a key technology in the full-scale arc reactor is a way to contain the reaction in a self-sustaining ring. This line of reasoning is definitely backed up by the toroidal field lines drawn in the Stark Industries arc reactor blueprints:.
There is also a remarkable lack of cooling loops, turbines, or anything that a traditional thermal reactor would require. Which means the arc reactor produces electricity directly, rather than by first generating heat. This observation jives with the fact that the megawatt-scale reactor in Tony's chest does not roast him alive.
So it cannot be a hot-fusion reactor, or a traditional thermal-fission reactor. Back to the drawing board!
Palladium has been proposed as a substrate for "cold" fusion that does not require hot plasmas and containment toroids, but this concept is pretty widely discredited in the real world. Palladium does, however, have some interesting capture and decay properties. Wikipedia: Isotopes of palladium. Palladium isotope Pd produces Rh rhodium via electron capture.
This means an inner electron is absorbed by the nucleus, merging with a proton to produce a neutron and an energetic photon -- a gamma ray. Another isotope, Pd, produces Ag silver via beta decay, releasing an electron when a neutron turns into a proton. This is kind of the opposite reaction as the above. I propose that Howard Stark found a way using comic-book physics to utilize the beta decay of Pd ions as an electron source for the electron capture of Pd, thereby producing an electric circuit between two different radioactive isotopes.
Of course, "high temperature" is relative: the REBCO coils operate at degrees Kelvin, or about minus degrees Fahrenheit, but that's warm enough to use abundant liquid nitrogen as a cooling agent. In his left hand, Brandon Sorbom holds a rare-earth barium copper oxide REBCO superconducting tape used in the fusion reactor's magnetic coils.
In his right hand is a typical copper electrical cable. The use of the new super conducting tape lowers costs and enables MIT to use plentiful liquid nitrogen as a cooling agent. In addition to size and cost, REBCO tape is also able to increase fusion power fold compared to standard superconducting technology. In fact, it requires so much power, that MIT must use a buffer transformer in order store enough electricity to run it without browning out the city of Cambridge.
And, with a plasma radius of just 0. After achieving sustainable performance, the ARC will determine whether net power generation is possible. The last hurdle before fusion reactors can supply power to the grid is transferring the heat to a generator. The reactor, completed in October , is the largest to date. Throwing a wrench into its efforts, MIT learned earlier this year that funding for its fusion reactor under the Department of Energy DOE is coming to an end.
Researchers hope to find other funding sources to make up for the loss. D students working to develop fusion energy. Making sure that scientists and students at MIT can transition into collaborations at other DOE-funded fusion energy research facilities in the U.
Whyte, however, believes the promise of fusion energy is too important for research to wind down. If we can [create] the technology that allows us to access smaller devices and build a variety of them And, Whyte said, the scientific basis for small fusion reactors has been established at MIT.
We actually have the record for achieving pressure of this plasma. Pressure is one of the fundamental bars you have to get over," Whyte said. Senior Reporter Lucas Mearian covers financial services IT including blockchain , healthcare IT and enterprise mobile issues including mobility management, security, hardware and apps.
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