If China can master nuclear, space, chips, it seems a bit stretch to say they it is the Jer engines where they fail.
China hasn’t mastered chips either yet in the same way it hasn’t mastered jet turbines: they can do cheap (high yields, low maintenance costs per hour of use), they can do high performance, they can’t do both yet at the same time.
Bollocks. Russia does that as well, single crystal turbine blades in particular so the west is not the sole gatekeeper here. Given the circumstances Russia might as well share the tech for some things in return
You’re joking. These have been put on network drives since early 2000s and CCP has hacked and exfil them
you don't exactly need to hack a network drive when you can just hire the guy who came up with it
It's not clear to me whether you already knew that those three names in particular are idiomatic in China as the names of 'random' people. 张三，李四，王五.
(Traditionally 李 was the most common surname in China. Last I heard it had been overtaken by 王.)
I don't know who random guys One and Two are.
Once China figures out how to have both at the same time, they will basically take over the worldwide market, let alone their domestic market.
Sure, automobiles aren’t as complex as a jet engine, but they’re still complex, especially the internal combustion variants.
Something like 10 years ago we were laughing at videos of Chinese cars spectacularly failing crash tests, and now China is selling to very heavily regulated markets.
Same deal with things like high speed rail.
I'm not sure China is known for their ICE designs. Like Korea, I suspect China partially pushed hard for EV specifically because the complexity in a battery + motor system is meaningfully simpler than the ICE equivalent and there's relatively little overlap in many facets outside of some first principles.
Jet engines are like ICE, but with a very reliability threshold. ICE is already complicated, but OEMs will accept a certain deviation on reliability if they need to because occurence might be low and severity is manageable. Not so in jet engine design. A single failure is a big deal.
I suspect it's wouldn't have been good strategy to try to build those cars for the US, CA or EU markets. An ICE engine is relatively straightforward, but hitting emissions and fuel efficiency targets is complex. [1] And the future of ICE cars, especially in those markets, is limited... why build out emissions expertise, when you can get your foot in the door with EVs?
[1] I recently bought a 1981 VW Vanagon which I try to maintain. That's a perfect time period to see how emissions control forces engine design. My engine has fuel injection and EGR, but a few years back has the same engine block with a carburetor; california emissions uses the same engine, but adds electronic ignition and an o2 sensor in the exhaust for closed loop injection control. A couple years later and they added water cooling. Every so often emissions and efficiency standards got harder to meet and you have to do more stuff.
Mainly copies of Japanese and US designs.
Low reliability and safety issues kills car brands. Consumers really don’t like it.
Sure, jet engines are on a very different level of reliability standards, but it seems to me that the concepts are all the same: highly regulated market of low-margin complex heavy machinery where it’s difficult to be a new entrant in the market.
1. Geopolitical risk of oil dependence. Domestic Chinese EVs are not dependent on imported oil. Oil imports would be at risk in case of a Taiwan conflict.
2. China already had established battery manufacturing. EVs are essentially batteries on wheels. For example the BYD Company (formerly named Shenzhen BYD Battery Company Limited) manufactured batteries long before manufacturing cars.
Say what you will, but I don't consider eminent domain to be some kind of mystical technology that only wizards possess.
For automobiles, China didn't compete with the West on its own turf in heavily regulated markets. They embraced EVs from the beginning. Complex auto regulations can't save Europe because EVs are an end-run around all of the complexity of building an economical, low-polluting engine.
Indeed, Europe is talking about relaxing some of its environmental regulations for petrol cars, now that those regulations are more of a barrier to home companies than foreign ones.
I will point out, the #3 top selling vehicle in the UK is a Chinese SUV with a gasoline engine (Jaecoo 7).
I think the idea that China just can’t make a reasonably competitive ICE vehicle is another outdated notion about China.
Don't need eminent domain to do that.
Also, eminent domain is used routinely in the US, like for Texas' most recent highway expansions. And highways require a lot more land than rails. I don't buy that eminent domain is the real reason here.
They are often made of superalloys, yet regular cars, down to econoboxes costing 20-30k or less have them, and are made by the millions.
It doesn’t even take a lot to understand that. It’s the same tried method they’ve been applying for decades now; information gathering, rapid prototyping cycles, quality threshold goals, led by overcapacity dominance. It’s really not much different than agile and “hyperscaling”, accepting massive losses for a long period because the objective is shifting core dynamics.
Ironically, in the US it was used to crush competition and innovation and parasitize the society while on the global scale, China is increasing competition and/or breaking up the monopoly of the parasitic cabal that controls the West and long the world.
It also treats EV motors as "commodity brushless motors" completely glossing over the actual engineering behind modern EV motors.
Twenty five years ago a Chinese supercomputer was laughable. Today they build them. Ten years ago Chinese cars were laughable, now they're sold worldwide. Ten years ago people laughed at the "metro to nowhere," now it's the core of a new central business district.
The fact that domestic Chinese engines have entered military service, to me, is a pretty strong indicator that given another decade or two, they'll be building some of the most competitive jet engines on earth.
For example the monocrystalline blades, which are touted as some holy grain, were in production engines on both sides of the iron curtain by the 70s. China has mastered this technology by the 2010s at the latest.
As for airliner engines, I looked up both the LEAP and the PW1000 and their 'hot' part - the turbines - have fairly conservative specs, roughly on par with these aforementioned 70s US/Soviet fighter engines. This is the technology tha's more or less shared between military and civilian engines.
The big Western advantage comes from manufacturing the bypass fan - the composite blades and the high-speed gearbox connecting them to the jet 'core' are technologies that the West has a huge lead on and that's why the reason comparable Russian and Chinese engines don't exist.
But strictly speaking, that's not really directly related to the tech in the turbine 'cores' which most people refer to when speaking about jets and not a peep is made about this in the article.
Fun story: it is not just jet engines - it is only recently that china was able to actually make indigenous ballpoint pens https://www.bbc.com/news/business-38566114
I've watched their manufacturing video recently and shocked how much of it was hand labour - it's not something I'd associate with precision. My partner said they must know better tho lol.
But those companies have no commercial interest in supporting a Chinese manufacturer that just wants the blades even without export controls, when they can make much higher margins selling whole engines that must be maintained using their parts (in practice variants of the engines destined for COMAC also omit some of the IP that finds its way onto Airbus and Boeing because you can help a customer too much...)
> DD6 is a second-generation nickel-based single-crystal superalloy developed by the institute with fully independent intellectual property. Its chief engineer, Li Jiarong, said the alloy’s performance matches or exceeds that of comparable second-generation superalloys used in Europe and the United States, at a lower production cost.
US manufacturers have already developed sixth-generation SC superalloys and most Western airlines are on engines with third- and fourth-generation materials.
The technology behind single crystal superalloys is relatively well understood, the problem is getting the process reliable enough to be economical in an industry that requires tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars to develop through trial and error. The TFA's point is that unlike EVs or semiconductors, the turbofan industry is between a rock and a hard place that China's other successful industries weren't.
[0] https://scholars-stage.org/china-and-the-future-of-science/
So when many of the top minds, publishing most of the top papers in your country got educated in USA but will most likely return to their country of origin - that needs to be factored in to the calculation (especially if tensions increase). At the end of the day I think it's arrogant and wrongheaded to pretend that the USA has dominance in R&D, against China in particular.
Is it willing to buy gender theory from you for similar amounts of money? If not, the production of specialized majors should not be 1:1.
Historically, societies which produced a lot of ideologically minded professionals (such as clergy), tended towards implementing that ideology top-down. I am on board with Turchin's theory of elite overproduction here, and gender studies is modern equivalent of catechism.
To choose a less ideological example: personally, I love Egyptology, but I would be a strict opponent of producing as many Egyptologists as aerospace engineers. Chances are that the superfluous graduates would push for an Egyptocentric department in every public institution and half of private ones.
Better that than, say, the business school.
From: https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/SummaryTables/report/360?templateI...
for example: - until the end of ww1 the haber bosch process was confined to germany
- jet engine turbine blades today
- most historically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire , medieval napalm that nobody has been able to replicate even now
its a clear prioritzation choice from the government, and that prioritization is itself a technology
notably this same prioritization mode resulted in the soviet union failing to produce quality of life improvements for its citizens.
the failure is that the CCP is unable to prioritize making simple useful stuff
Source from al-Arabiya: https://english.alarabiya.net/variety/2017/01/14/At-last-Chi...
The point (no pun intended) is that China was beginning to crack the processes for making the precision machine tools that make machine tools.
> 2.3-millimetre
> Ballpoint pen tips are microscopic tungsten carbide ball held inside ultra-thin steel sockets
1. Powder prep your tungsten carbide
2. Form said powder
3. Thermally prepare the resulting slurry using a vacuum forming furnace
4. Finish it with diamond lap grinders, lapping machines and polishing machines
5. Clean it ultrasonically, with solvent, rinse, then dry them.
6. Have the metrology required to test thousands of micron-scale balls a day (a world-beating skill in itself)
7. Build a QA lab that can assure the quality of said balls statistically (you can test them all).
8. And then integrate them via socket assembly
are not just hereditary, but proprietary. And assuming a competitor does manage to achieve the basic ISO 3290 and ASTM F2094 standards, you still need tacit knowledge. Stuff like sintering temperature curves, proper powder grain distribution, polishing chemistry, proper statistical rejection thresholds and a whole lot more.
And that is just the ball. Not the socket, or the ink channels. Making a perfectly spherical 0.5 mm ± 0.0001 mm tungsten carbide ball requires the same techniques used in building micromotors, medical devices, and semiconductor subcomponent manufacturing. Techniques such as high-volume sorting, advanced powder metallurgy, controlled sintering, and precision machines that operate 24-hour shifts without drifting. All operated by modern process engineers who are the spiritual (or actual?) descendants of Swiss watchmakers or the glassmakers of Murano.
" China's inability to produce a complete, high-quality ballpoint pen came to widespread attention in 2015, when Prime Minister Li Keqiang singled out the products at a seminar in Beijing, noting that his writing was "rough" when he used Chinese-made ballpoint pens. For Li, China's failure to manufacture a complete ballpoint pen was indicative of the Chinese economy's weaknesses. "That's the real situation facing us," Li said at the time. "We cannot make ballpoint pens with a smooth writing function." "
https://www.smh.com.au/world/finally-china-manufactures-a-ba...
We already know this was an issue with the soviets, back when they had the plans for us jet engines (for fighter planes), but couldn't replicate them. Same for stealth, hell even some of their rocketry. And the soviets had plenty of auxiliary systems already in place, during the cold war. As someone said above, they could do quantity, they could do limited high-quality, but couldn't do both at the same time.
There are things that work with 5-year plans: railroads, road infra, buildings, etc. And there are things that are not that easy, and take multiple decades from when the order comes to having it realised. Something that's not immediately obvious for western folks is that when you mix central planning with authoritarian governments, you will get a huge number of pain points along the way, where orders come downwards towards the ones executing them, and overreporting/missrepresentations/lies go upwards. It's like the longest game of telephone, where you start from the top, demanding x y z, get reports that you're on your way of getting 3x, 3y, 3z and in reality you have some of x, none of y, and z looks like z but it's actually three x's in a trench coat.