A Cathay Pacific Airbus A350 aircraft at Kingsford Smith Airport on August 18, 2021 in Sydney, Australia. Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd., is the flag carrier of Hong Kong with its main hub being at Hong Kong International Airport.
James D. Morgan | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Rolls-Royce shares opened higher Tuesday, making up some of the previous session’s losses after Cathay Pacific cancelled several flights upon discovering technical issues in aircraft utilizing the British manufacturer’s Trent XWB-97 engines.
Rolls-Royce shares were 4.6% higher at 8:46 a.m. London time Tuesday, after falling 6.5% on Monday.
Cathay Pacific on Tuesday announced it had identified an engine component failure in 15 of its Airbus A350 aircraft — a long-range, wide-body that uses Rolls-Royce engines. The issue was found following an engine component failure on a Zurich-bound flight operated by the carrier from its base in Hong Kong on Sept. 2. The plane did not complete its journey and returned to Hong Kong.
Cathay Pacific shares dipped 0.6% Tuesday.
The airline said three aircraft had already been successfully repaired, with the remaining aircraft expected to resume operations by Sept. 7.
The issue led to the cancellation of nearly 40 flights on Monday. Long-haul flights are not expected to be affected going forward and customers will be offered alternative routes, Cathay Pacific said.
Details on cancellations up to Sept. 7 will be released by 2 p.m. local time Wednesday, the company added.
Rolls-Royce on Tuesday confirmed its Trent XWB-97 was used in the aircraft. Investors are sensitive to such problems given the engine issues at Pratt & Whitney which have caused significant delays to Airbus deliveries of some aircraft; and the long-running series of manufacturing problems at the U.S.’s Boeing.
Rolls-Royce said that Hong Kong authorities had launched an investigation that restricted the company’s ability to comment, but noted that it was “committed to working closely with the airline, aircraft manufacturer and the relevant authorities to support their efforts.”
It added it would keep other airlines that operate Trent XWB-97 engines “fully informed of any relevant developments as appropriate.”
“While the news raises some concerns, our preliminary analysis is that the financial liability could be contained. Hence, our positive view of the equity story is unchanged,” Deutsche Bank analysts said Tuesday.
U.K. stocks rose Thursday, as the FTSE 100 Index FTSE 100 Index closed up 0.19% at 7,483.58.
Among FTSE 100 constituents, technical services company Intertek Group PLC Intertek Group PLC saw the largest increase Thursday, as shares climbed 3.42%.
Shares of air freight firm International Distribution Services PLC International Distribution…
A robotic arm gets to work at German manufacturer Rittal’s smart factory in Haiger, to the west of Hesse, Germany.
Rittal
Conversational artificial intelligence that can be used to communicate with equipment and generate machine parts. Digital versions of vehicles and planes that can be modified to fine-tune their physical counterparts. And autonomous robots that move as you walk by.
These are just a few of the technologies that will power the factories of the future, according to technologists and industry experts who spoke with CNBC.
In the future, factories will be much more connected, relying on a mix of technologies, from artificial intelligence, data platforms and edge devices to the cloud, robotics and sensors, Goetz Erhardt, Europe lead for Accenture’s digital engineering and manufacturing division, told CNBC.
“These technologies support fully automated, ‘dark’ plants, automated decision-making, enhanced equipment monitoring, and new production networks with recycling and upcycling capabilities,” Erhardt said via email.
Today’s factories — from those used in machinery and automobiles to food processing plants — have progressively become more advanced with regard to adopting technology. Robotic arms involved in the manufacturing process — adding and removing materials, welding and placing goods on pallets — are now a common sight.
As much more advanced artificial intelligence technologies are added into the mix, the industrial manufacturing process could shake up further. Conversational systems such as OpenAI’s GPT could one day become integrated into robotics, enabling more sophisticated, emotionally intelligent machines.
“Generative AI (AI that makes new content in response to user inputs) has enormous potential in manufacturing for equipment optimization, interaction and intelligence — from robotic processes through to machining,” Simon Floyd, director of manufacturing and transportation industries at Google Cloud, told CNBC.
Google is among the tech world giants looking to capitalize on large language models, which can generate more humanlike responses thanks to the huge amounts of data they are trained on. The company launched its own AI chatbot Bard earlier this year to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Consumer products aren’t the only focus of Google’s AI efforts. The company recently upgraded its cloud platform for manufacturers to more efficiently pull data from machines and detect anomalies in the production process.
Going forward, AI will be able to “converse using natural language with manufacturing equipment to understand the current state and the predicted future performance — therefore assisting people and allowing them to focus on high value tasks,” Google Cloud’s Floyd told CNBC.
Floyd said that Google is already working to achieve this with natural language processing capabilities in its AI tools. The company has also created a language model for robots called PaLM-E, which gathers sensory information from the physical environment, as well as text-based inputs.
Engineers will eventually be able to develop new machinery using generative AI tools, Floyd said.
“In the future, there is potential to generate content from and for many types of manufacturing equipment, ranging from specific repair instructions to software code that is tailored to a specific asset.”
One development many industrialists are excited about is “digital twins” — 3D digital replicas of objects in the physical world that can be modified and updated in parallel with the items they aim to mimic.
One example of a company using digital twins to aid its physical manufacturing is Rolls Royce, whose engineers create precise virtual copies of its jet engines and then install sensors and satellite networks on-board to feed back data to the digital copy in real time.
“Imagine that for every modern Rolls Royce jet engine up on a plane in the sky, there’s one in the cyber sphere that needs to be maintained, working out how much stress is going through the plane. That will depend on how the engine is faring in the atmospheric conditions and pressures in the air,” said John Hill, CEO of Silico AI, a startup that focuses on digital twins for business processes.”
Digital twins form part of the so-called “metaverse,” which embodies the idea that people will spend more of their work and leisure time in huge 3D digital spaces. Some companies are also looking to incorporate the physical world in some iterations of the metaverse.
Many manufacturers see potential in the “industrial metaverse,” a version of the metaverse tailored to the manufacturing, construction and engineering industries. Accenture’s Erhardt told CNBC that he is mainly seeing use cases in creative collaboration and product development, maintenance and remote repairs, designing and optimizing production operations, and workforce training
“The metaverse could become a game changer for industrial companies once they couple its collaborative, immersive, visual and intuitive dimensions with digital twins fed by integrated data pools across departments, systems, operations technology and IT,” Erhardt said. “This could create a virtual, fully immersive and intuitive simulation of the entire enterprise.”
Companies are looking for ways to cut down on more menial tasks in factories with digital technology, amid a wave of labor shortages.
“Previously, automation has not been an option for manufacturing products due to minimal financial resources and investment,” Olivier Ribet, Executive Vice President, EMEAR at Dassault Systèmes, told CNBC.
“However, this is changing rapidly due to technological changes that have decreased costs and democratized automation through low/no code robotics allowing more manufacturing companies to leverage the advantages of automation in terms of precision, efficiency, and productivity.”
There are downsides to consider — not least of which job security — as the rise of AI and digital automation in factories has led to worries about the labor market. Generative AI, a relatively recent development, could erase 300 million jobs, Goldman Sachs estimates.
Still, history shows that technological progress doesn’t just make jobs redundant, it also creates new roles— which typically outpaces the number of jobs displaced. Manufacturers are still scrambling for staff, with 41% of manufacturing businesses citing talent pool as a “very significant” barrier preventing full potential, according to a Bain and Company survey.
The hope is that connecting machines to the internet and integrating sensors and predictive AI algorithms will allow them to more safely navigate their surroundings and work collaboratively with humans, rather than replace them, according to Maya Pindeus, CEO of AI startup Humanising Autonomy.
“Think of the factory, you have robot arms, you have different vehicles to move goods around, you have operators, you have safety cameras,” Pindeus told CNBC.
“What I would look at in the factory of the future is you have high levels of safe automation that can operate around people … I’ve been to factories where you have the big robot arm caged up and it’s really far away from people. It looks very inefficient to me.”
Rolls-Royce has been working on a Micro-Reactor program “to develop technology that will provide power needed for humans to live and work on the Moon.”
Lorenzo Di Cola | Nurphoto | Getty Images
LONDON — The UK Space Agency said Friday it would back research by Rolls-Royce looking at the use of nuclear power on the moon.
In a statement, the government agency said researchers from Rolls-Royce had been working on a Micro-Reactor program “to develop technology that will provide power needed for humans to live and work on the Moon.”
The UKSA will now provide £2.9 million (around $3.52 million) of funding for the project, which it said would “deliver an initial demonstration of a UK lunar modular nuclear reactor.”
The new money builds upon £249,000 provided by the UKSA to fund a study in 2022.
“All space missions depend on a power source, to support systems for communications, life-support and science experiments,” it said.
“Nuclear power has the potential to dramatically increase the duration of future Lunar missions and their scientific value.”
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Rolls-Royce is set to work with a range of organizations on the project, including the University of Sheffield’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre and Nuclear AMRC, and the University of Oxford.
“Developing space nuclear power offers a unique chance to support innovative technologies and grow our nuclear, science and space engineering skills base,” Paul Bate, chief executive of the UK Space Agency, said.
Bate added that Rolls-Royce’s research “could lay the groundwork for powering continuous human presence on the Moon, while enhancing the wider UK space sector, creating jobs and generating further investment.”
According to the UKSA, Rolls-Royce — not to be confused with Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, which is owned by BMW — is aiming “to have a reactor ready to send to the Moon by 2029.”
The news out of the U.K. comes at a time when NASA is pushing ahead with its Artemis program, which is focused on creating what it calls a “sustainable presence on the Moon to prepare for missions to Mars.”
NASA is working with international and commercial partners on Artemis. In July 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first person to set foot on the moon.
