Engineering with AI: our talk at Viennahydro 2026
On 20 November 2026 Philipp Erlach speaks in Laxenburg near Vienna on “Engineering with AI: Making Errors, Keeping the Lessons”: what an AI can compute in turbine engineering and where people are still needed.
Viennahydro is the hydropower conference in Laxenburg near Vienna. In 2012 we presented the Pelton turbine System Erlach to the professional community there. On 20 November 2026 we return with a different question: what can artificial intelligence do for hydropower?
Computing gets cheap, judging stays costly
Josef and Philipp Erlach computed two distributors for Pelton turbines with an AI: on a notebook, in 31 runs, just under six hours in total. Without nozzles, the results match the values an institute obtained in 2020 for a comparable distributor.
The effort lay elsewhere: in finding the errors. We counted 17, and in the talk we show who found them, the designer, the agent or a second model acting as reviewer.
A good AI system is built like a good team
Our experience from just under eight weeks: it needs a second reader, a duty to cite sources, a check against known values and the option to say: I don’t know.
The figures apply to this one case. We chose it because we know our own turbine and could check the results against earlier measurements and calculations.
After the event in Vienna we will publish a report on it here, together with the full content of the talk.