Advanced manufacturing powered by quantum computing

In this weeks newsletter I want to talk about a topic that I am very excited about, as it brings together 2 fields that I absolutely love, quantum computing and advanced manufacturing. As some of you might know, before coming back to the quantum realm I co-founded a company in the field of advanced manufacturing. Knowing the field of advanced manufacturing and quantum computing gives me a unique perspective on these 2 fields, which I was honored to share already at several events.

A very important aspect of advanced manufacturing is simulation. As production methods get more and more complicated, eyeballing properties of the end product and production parameters becomes a less and less viable option for production planning. If we take for example additive manufacturing (AM, the industrial version of 3D printing), metal 3D printers like the ones of EOS or Nikon SLM Solutions can have hundreds of parameters that can be adjusted. However, depending on the exact material the corridor of producibility for these parameters might be narrow and might include different end part properties (flexibility, hardness, density, porosity,...).

This means, finding the right combinations of parameters to achieve high quality end products together with their anticipated properties is a difficult task. Additional, classical trial and error to find the right parameters becomes a time intensive and expensive task as many production parameters mean also endless possibilities to choose them wrong. That is why companies like Oqton , 1000 Kelvin , 3D Systems Corporation and many others are already fusing traditional CAD/CAM systems with simulations to predict and optimize production outcomes without the need of endless trials.

The most used method for these simulation is the finite element method (FEM). FEM subdivides a given object or topology into smaller section, the properties of each section is then represented by a set of partial differential equations (PDE). Solving these PDEs is not an easy task for classical computers and can take hours, days or in some cases even weeks or months depending on the complexity of the simulation and the required granularity. This means that often FEM simulations can not performed in the required complexity and resolution.

Even though quantum computers are not yet available with qubit numbers and fidelity that would allow the PDE solvers to run, they seem here to be a good way forward. Compared to other fields of quantum computation, the development of PDE solvers is still very young. On of the first papers about this application I found is from 2021 . However, especially over the last 2 years the amount of publications in this field increased significantly. In 2023, one of the research papers made it even in the renowned Springer Nature magazine. In the paper they describe the use of Chebyshev points to achieve an efficient quantum amplitude estimation algorithm (QAEA) implementation of a PDE solver.

But, the topic is by far not only a pure scientific one any more. Airbus is already researching the application of quantum computers for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations to predict the aerodynamics of new airplane designs without the need for building expensive models. Such simulation done by classical computers require huge high power computing (HPC) clusters and calculation times of days or even weeks. The Airbus team sees here potential to reduce calculation times and increase resolution of the simulation by using quantum computers.

FEM simulation are an important topic not just for the above mentioned applications, but many many more. I hope to see more research, but most importantly, also much more engagement by the industry towards this topic in the near future. The exponential computational gain delivered by quantum computers could be a real game changer for FEM based simulations and the connected industries.

I hope this weeks 'Entangled Threads' newsletter was informative for you. If it was, please like it, share it with your peers and leave me a comment below. I am looking forward to fruitful discussions in the comments. If you have any questions about this topic or other quantum computing related topics, please feel free to reach out. Read you next time!