THE HISTORY OF innovation is full of happy accidents. The World Wide Web? Came from particle physicists at CERN who wanted easier internal communication. Wi-Fi? Invented by radio astronomers in Australia trying to detect pulses of radio waves from exploding black holes. And it took a failed space mission to fix the one of the biggest problems in green energy: The awful grinding noise of a wind farm at work.
More inventions than you’d expect come not from focused, dedicated research, but the serendipitous application of tech developed for some other purpose—often a space-going one. Like the planet-finding technology from the European Space Agency’s Darwin mission, which recently ended up in a bunch of noisy German wind turbines.
A decade ago, Nicolas Loix was developing hardware for Darwin, an ESA project that would use a telescope designed to search for exoplanets. Looking for planets outside our solar system is tough, because the stars that they orbit are so bright they overpower the signal that would let astronomers see them. Darwin aimed to solve that problem with precisely aligned mirrors—accurately positioned within a nanometer range, about a thousand times narrower than the width of a human hair—to cancel out the image of the star and reveal the exoplanet next door. That meant the tiniest vibration could keep the astronomers from capturing their far-away images.
That’s where Loix came in. His company, Micromega Dynamics, specializes in anti-vibration technology. Unwanted vibrations can plague all sorts of industrial technology, from printers whose cartridges spit out images in rainbow smears…to a mission in space that needs hyper-aligned mirrors. Loix, in collaboration with a few other companies, developed special actuators for the telescope. They acted like springs, counteracting vibrations in Darwin’s mirrors to stabilize them.
The tech worked, but in 2007, the Darwin mission got shelved because the ESA decided it was too expensive. Organizations like the European Space Agency and NASA have to set their game plans decades in advance, and lots of proposed missions, after years of prototyping new technology and millions of dollars of investment, are abandoned.
But last year, Loix was approached by a wind turbine company based on Germany. It desperately needed to reduce the amount of noise produced by its blades. The regulations on wind turbines in Germany are strict: The loudest a turbine can be is about the volume of a lawn mower 100 feet away, if it’s the right time of day and the turbine isn’t next to, say, a nursing home. People also get persnickety about the turbine’s pitch—high shrieks are frowned upon more than low whirring. On a windy day, the company’s turbine blades would turn gears to convert mechanical wind energy into electricity. But the teeth of the turning gears would smash against each other, vibrating to make a nasty sound. And the shriek only got amplified by the rest of the turbine structure.
To fix the problem, the company needed a solid anti-vibration technology—and it just so happened that the fix was similar to the company’s work on Darwin. “It was a matter of scaling and adapting to a new situation,” Loix says. Because of its experience with Darwin, Loix’s company already had the basic framework—the simulation tools, the engineering tools, and the electronics—to counteract the vibrations. “We only had a few weeks to be able to conceive and to implement an anti-noise system for multi-megawatts of wind turbines. Without our previous experience with Darwin, it would have taken maybe two years,” says Loix.
“Scientists say ‘We want this,’ and then engineers will start working on it. Often it’s more expensive than expected, so we go back and try to do it with cheaper hardware,” says Teun van den Dool, an engineer who worked on Darwin’s anti-vibration tech at a different company. “But this is still technology that works.”
This circuitous path, in which a technology developed to answer one burning scientific question ends up getting used in an entirely different field, is nothing new. Loix recalls someone asking a prominent astronomer why she studied stars when she knew she could never physically visit them. If you ask engineers to develop something interesting for the community, she answered, they will fail. But if you ask him to look at the stars, the technology they invent to pursue that challenging question can always be transferred for the community’s use.
“The Darwin technology was for looking for extraterrestrial planets, and the technology used to reach that goal can solve problems on Earth,” Loix says. “We have developed tools to study a very challenging problem, and we have used this technology to solve very present problems generated by wind turbines. It is unexpected, but it’s there.”
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