March 15, 2007

Mapping technology chaos

Dr. David Wojick, PE, Consultant

Power engineers are under pressure to develop and deploy new technologies at an ever-quickening pace. The world of power engineering today might best be described as one of technology chaos. Strict new requirements for SO₂, NO_x, and mercury reduction are here. CO₂ capture and sequestration are on the horizon and on the Hill. Then there are efficiency issues, renewable portfolio standards, integrated gasification combined-cycle (IGCC) technology, next-generation nukes, the hydrogen economy, biomass, solar and wind, and so much more. Untold billions of dollars are in play, with the cost of SO₂ control alone pegged at $50 billion over the next five years.

 

In the midst of all this uproar, engineers are supposed to know what is going on and coming on, but the projects and possibilities are legion. Clearly, engineers have a lot of homework to do for their own projects. They also have to avoid being blindsided in a meeting by the latest whiz-bang Wall Street Journal article. Technology assessment in the face of this kind of chaos may seem impossible, but it is also mandatory.

Why is it all so complicated? The Department of Energy's Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) is studying this question. OSTI is taking big steps to make it feasible to get one's arms around the latest science and technology. The OSTI focus is on finding DOE research first, federal research second, and then science and technology around the world, as explained below.
 

Diffusion confusion

How does a power engineer find out what's happening that's related to his or her field or project? Why is it so hard?

The basic technology assessment problem can be put in one word—diffusion. The flow of knowledge in science and technology is an extremely complex diffusion process. Much of the complexity is due to two simple processes that overlay one another—convergence and divergence.

Figure 1 is a highly simplified and stylized picture of science and technology diffusion. The sheer complexity of the interrelationships is what makes the concept so hard to grasp, even though the individual relationships may be clear. Not only is the pattern complex, but it represents many possible combinations of divergent and convergent flow over time in the future. The possibilities are not endless, but they are many. They may even be well defined, but the array is structurally complex and virtually impossible to visualize mentally.

 

 

Each lettered box in Figure 1 represents a project currently being developed. Projects span the spectrum of development, from basic, cutting-edge research to fielding established technologies. The projects included depend on the scale of interest. A project's focus might be narrow, like corrosion on IGCC turbine blades, or very broad, like clean coal technology. On a broader scale, the projects might represent entire research communities.

Links indicate the potential flow of results from one project to another at a later stage of development, or from left to right. For simplicity's sake, each project is shown feeding just three downstream projects. Not shown is that fact that new projects may come into being, and existing ones may disappear, as time goes by.

There are a great many link-by-link paths between distant projects. That's the consequence of divergence and convergence. Results from A may diverge, working their way to C or D, or both. Yet C and D may be very different technologically. Likewise, results from A or B, or both, may converge on C. People working on operational-level power technologies, who are interested in what's new, tend to look for convergence. But for those seeking to understand how a new basic technology will change the status quo, divergence is mostly what they look at. Trying to look at both at the same time is already very hard, and it's getting harder.
 

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