Gizmodo US Editor-In-Chief Geoff Manaugh and UK architects Smout Allen tapped an unlikely source to help create their new exhibition in London: Williams F1. But, in this case, the engineers at Williams weren’t building the advanced race cars they’re well-known for — they were 3D-printing the parts for an intricate model of an experimental energy storage park.
So, what are we looking at here? It’s a concept model of the Flywheel Reservoir, a proposed reserve-energy park for the coast of Kent, where excess energy from the world’s largest wind farm — the London Array — could be stored in a subterranean park of hybrid-power flywheels (a technology Williams is well-known for).
On Williams’ operational model, those flywheels are the repetitive bits — printed in their high-tech fab lab.
Other incredible models abound, too. One shows the Nottingham caves, 3D-printed in relief. How did the team generate a realistic model? With a huge set of laser-scanning data from the Nottingham Caves Survey and some extra help from the U.K.-based ScanLAB Projects, of course.
