After electric air taxis, commercial space and artificial intelligence, is quantum computing the next big thing for private investors—and what could it mean for aviation?
Airbus is keeping a close watch on the technology to see if it fulfills its promise to outperform classical computing and enable more optimized aircraft designs and operations.
In December 2023, Airbus and BMW Group launched a challenge, the Quantum Mobility Quest, to harness quantum computing technologies for real-world applications. In June, 15 finalists were selected to benchmark solutions—ranging from an all-optical laser computer to an algorithm to improve transport between manufacturing sites—using datasets provided by Airbus and BMW.
“Our industry is extremely reliant on computational power,” Jasper Krauser, Airbus’ central coordinator for quantum technology, said on an April webinar organized by Quantum Insider. The manufacturer has major high-performance computing centers in Hamburg and Toulouse. “They are used for traditional tasks such as structural modeling, aerodynamic and acoustic simulations, so they are extremely computationally expensive,” he said.
At the same time, Airbus’ latest products, from aircraft to satellites, are generating more and more data that need to be processed and analyzed, which also requires computational power. “We already know we will need more in the future,” Krauser said. “But there are economic limits, and also the question of the energy consumption of those systems, which doesn’t make sense at a certain level. So, we need to explore new solutions. And quantum is one of those options which is very promising.”
Still in their infancy, today’s quantum computers are inherently noisy and error prone. Practical machines that can tackle real-world industrial problems are still some years away. But recent progress may have brought them closer and private investors are taking note, pumping $1 billion into quantum computing startups in 2023, according to Pitchbook.
Classical computers perform calculations by storing information as bits with a value of either 0 or 1. Quantum computers use qubits, which can exist in many states simultaneously. As the qubit count rises, the number of simultaneous computational states scales, dramatically reducing the time it takes to perform calculations.
In December 2023, IBM declared the opening of the era of “quantum utility,” breaking the 1,000-qubit barrier with its Condor processor and launching the Heron, a 133-qubit processor with a five-fold improvement in error reduction and the core of its modular quantum supercomputer architecture. Quantum computers could overtake classical machines within two years, IBM says.
For now, to benchmark their solutions against classical computing, contestants in the Airbus BMW challenge will have to make do with cloud access to quantum computing simulation and hardware resources provided by Amazon Bracket, part of Amazon Web Services.
Launched in December 2023, the Quantum Mobility Quest has four main tracks covering different use cases for quantum computing: self-healing smart coatings for aluminum, manufacturing supply-chain optimization, training vision systems for autonomous vehicles, and predictive modeling of aerodynamic flows and acoustic waves. A fifth track invited other ideas for a “golden app” for quantum in the mobility sector.
“At Airbus, we are structuring our quantum applications along four different areas, like chemistry related problems. Here, we have worked together [with BMW] on modeling chemistry in fuel cells, which is relevant for both of our industries,” Krauser said.
“We’re also looking into optimization problems, with a strong focus on operations—how you optimize trajectories, for example, to save fuel,” he said. “We’re looking also at quantum machine learning, focusing on data processing and analysis.
“And then, for us, it’s really at the heart of our industrial sector to look into what we call quantum solvers,” Krauser said. “We see potential to use quantum computers in solving equations to improve, for example, aerodynamic modeling.”
This is Airbus’ second quantum computing challenge. The first, in 2020, posed problems including the optimization of aircraft climb performance and wingbox design as well as computational fluid dynamics. The winner was a quantum algorithm for aircraft loading optimization.
Having conducted their own quantum challenges, Airbus and BMW joined forces to launch the latest contest after working together to develop a hybrid classical-quantum computing approach to speed up research into the chemical reactions of catalysts in hydrogen fuel cells. Using a quantum computer, the partners accurately modeled the oxygen reduction reaction on the surface of a platinum-based catalyst with the goal of improving fuel cell efficiency.
Quantum is coming. “Some quantum technologies such as quantum sensors and communications devices are technically more mature compared to quantum computing, and we can now take the next step and integrate those devices into our products,” Krauser said. “For quantum computing, it’s still very early,” he said. “It’s on a different timeline but we have to make sure we are ready as a company to use quantum computing when we have reached the right technical level.”
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