Lowering the Bill on Manufacturers

Smart electrolyzers and real-time control can help manufacturers respond to fluctuating energy costs. 24% of AI initiatives are focused on cost or efficiencies. Bezos gives a tour.

Aug 18, 2024

Shop Talk

Capturing this week's zeitgeist

“The two NASA astronauts overstaying on the ISS aren't the first astronauts to be stuck in space… and they probably won't be the last.” What will happen to them?

Kaizen Blitz

🚦 Andon Status
- 🟢 Resilience in the US Midwest small manufacturing sector
- 🟢 Why Small Semiconductor Fab And Assembly Houses Are Thriving
📊 Survey Says
- The Manufacturers Alliance reports companies are gearing their AI initiatives toward strategic business gains, with 55% of those surveyed prioritizing strategy, although 24% are focused on cost or efficiencies.
- Inc. 5000 2024 was released, with manufacturing and supply chain tech firms Kodiak (20), CleanFiber (48), Lucid Bots (143), SendCutSend (511), Hirebotics (755), Thinear (3131) and more making the list.
- 🇲🇽🚛 Mexico: Annual Cargo Theft Report 2023 indicates theft remains one of the main problems affecting Mexico’s supply chains.
🗣️ Town Hall
- 🧠🦾 The new CEO of Rapid Robotics, Kimberley Losey, explains how AI advances enable faster picking.
🏆 Golden Part
- 🛩️ Textron delivers 400th Cessna Citation Latitude private jet
- 🚜📡 Global fleet management platform Wialon announces 4 million connected vehicles in 160 countries.
🏢💸 Corporate Development
- Breakthrough Energy Ventures’ third fund has raised $839M and targets five key areas in climate innovation, including energy and transportation.
- Steel Atlas has raised a $10 million debut fund to bridge Western tech with Saudi investment
- Ohio VC Fest will occur September 17-18, 2024, at the Huntington Convention Center of Cleveland.
🏭💰 Production Planning
- 🇺🇸 Natron Energy’s $1.4 Billion Sodium-Ion Factory in North Carolina
- 🇺🇸 Ebon Solar Picks New Mexico for $942M Solar Factory
- 🇨🇦 Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company is expanding and modernizing its Napanee, Ontario, plant with C$575M investment.
- 🇺🇸 EFC Announces $210 Million Investment in Semiconductor Industry in McGregor, Texas.
🏛️📜 Industrial Policy
- 🇺🇸 Delays hit 40% of Biden’s major IRA manufacturing projects.
- 🇯🇵 Japan bullet train extension plan under pressure as costs soar
- 🇮🇳 India’s Fabless Semiconductor Supply Chain is Far from Fabulous

Assembly Line

This week's most influential Industry 4.0 media.

🔌🔻 General Mills and Brau Union Take Aim at Factory Electricity Bills

✍️ Author: Grant Gerke
🔖 Topics: Sustainability
🏭 Vertical: Food
🏢 Organizations: General Mills, Brau Union, Cybertrol Engineering, Endress Hauser, Vanmark, Siemens, ThinkIQ

The average factory electricity bill varies across the manufacturing industry. The dairy industry hovers around 5% to 8%, and breweries cite 5% to 10% of their operating costs on energy. Factory electricity bills for meat processors can reach 15%, and the sugar industry touches 30%.

Freshwater consumption per peeler is reduced to 0.5 to 2 gal./thousand (GPM) during regular operation. The recycled water is drained and flushed periodically. Moreover, the OEM also offers an option via its system starch separator for its line of Lamina Hydrocutting equipment. According to Vanmark, traditional potato processing includes 2% of water being bled out and is continuously replaced with clean water. The supplier’s system starch separator creates a cyclone in the line that pushes the starchiest water to the pipe’s edge and removes the water. This new feature reduces water consumption for the “bleeding process” while providing the right level of cleaning.

Recently, General Mills worked with ThinkIQ and used its machine learning algorithms to forecast a savings of $480,000 annually with the food and beverage giant’s energy bills. ThinkIQ’s software as a service (SaaS) platform identifies and forecasts “blind spots” within manufacturing sites by implementing an informational model to capture data, visualize plant applications, and promote machine learning.

🚀 First Look Inside Blue Origin's New Glenn Factory w/ Jeff Bezos!

🏢 Organizations: Blue Origin

💧 Inside a Green-Hydrogen Pilot Plant

✍️ Author: Jesse Orrall
🏢 Organizations: Verdagy

The process that Verdagy’s technology facilitates is called alkaline water electrolysis. An electrolyte solution, in this case potassium hydroxide (KOH), is pumped through an electrolyzer, which adds electricity to the mix, splitting the water molecules into hydrogen on the negatively charged (cathode) side and oxygen on the positively charged (anode) side.

The KOH isn’t consumed, so it gets mixed with new water, to replace what was split, and pumped back into the electrolyzer to continue the process. Verdagy CTO Tom McWaid says the electrolyte’s role is to increase the conductivity of the water and make the process more energy efficient.

This process takes place within Verdagy’s “smart cells,” which work together to make up one of the electrolyzers. Each cell can be monitored in real-time, turned up or down to respond to fluctuating energy costs, and can be swapped out or serviced when needed. Multiple electrolyzers can be put together to increase the output of a green-hydrogen plant.

🦾 CyRo at Denso - Hot Swapping Robot between Multiple Assembly Tasks & instantaneously self-adjusting

🏢 Organizations: CynLr, Denso

🪫♻️ Electrolysis helps resolve battery production’s waste issue

✍️ Author: Will Girling
🔖 Topics: Electrolysis
🏭 Vertical: Automotive
🏢 Organizations: Aepnus Technology

Sodium sulphate is a by-product resulting from the use of sulfuric acid and caustic soda during the refinement of critical metals for manufacturing common cathodes, including nickel-manganese-cobalt. It is also created during battery recycling—the Argonne National Lab’s EverBatt model estimates that 800kg is produced per 1,000kg of battery materials processed. Sodium sulphate does have limited commercial use, but the uptick in EV battery production means that responsibly disposing of greater quantities becomes difficult.

Aepnus Technology’s solution was to develop a new electrolyser—a stack of metal electrodes separated by membranes and fed aqueous feedstocks, which are then turned into desired chemical products through the application of electricity. “This is how we can take sodium sulphate and transform it back into the two chemical reagent workhorses of the battery industry: sulfuric acid and caustic soda,” explains Hackl. Essentially, the company takes what was formerly a waste product bound for landfill and reintroduces its constituent parts to the supply chain.

🛰️ This Next Billion-Dollar Startup Wants To Save American Manufacturing

🏢 Organizations: Hadrian

More news from Hadrian

Hadrian and Dirac announce a partnership “that will enable aerospace and defense companies to more easily tackle the challenge of manufacturing, assembly, and production at scale.”
Hadrian acquires Datum Source, a procurement management Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform and manufacturing network.

🎛️ Manufacturing process optimization for real-time quality control in multi-regime conditions: Tire tread production use case

✍️ Authors: Katarina Stanković, Dea Jelić, Nikola Tomašević, Aleksandra Krstić
🔖 Topics: Suffix Tree Search, Reinforcement Learning
🏭 Vertical: Plastics and Rubber
🏢 Organizations: University of Belgrade

The high-stake nature of most manufacturing processes empowers the importance of real-time quality control and assurance. In the event of a failure in production, a decision-making process can be time-consuming for the human and prevent timely actions. The agility can be boosted with a decision-support system based on artificial intelligence. Particularly, multi-objective process optimization can be employed to select the optimal control settings in real-time, and thus enhance relevant key performance indicators, concurrently.

Based on process and quality parameters being streamed from the production plant in real-time, the optimizer can act in timely critical and quality-threatening situations and generate immediate corrective actions. The multi-regime operation of the plant and design space dimensionality can impact the convergence rate and add to execution time. Therefore, production regimes recognition and greedy search of suffix tree-based models of the process have been engaged, aiding in a better-focused and faster space search at an early phase of the algorithm run.

Beyond simply reviewing the outputs, the user can leave feedback, which is utilized by the optimizer’s reinforcement learning mechanisms. Validated in this real-world scenario, the solution produced a rise from 81.83% to 90.91% in the tread quality.

Read more at Journal of Manufacturing Systems

New Product Introduction

Highlighting new and innovative facilities, processes, products, and services

Pico MES to Offer its Software for Free

🔖 Topics: Digital Work Instructions

To help small and midsized manufacturers take advantage of digital transformation, software supplier Pico MES has announced that all manufacturers will be able to use its digital work instruction suite of tools for free.

Every manufacturer that signs up will receive a free cloud-based instance with capabilities to build worker guidance instructions, create digital process flows, and assign stations. The only restrictions will be on the number of stations and operators who can use the software.

“This is not a free trial with a time limit. This no-cost model supports our mission of modernizing the supply base and taking cost out of the equation,” says Ryan Kuhlenbeck, CEO and co-founder of Pico MES.

Vuzix Employs New Micro-touch Imprinting Process to Increase Optical Waveguide Performance and Production Throughput

🏢 Organizations: Vuzix

Vuzix® Corporation (NASDAQ: VUZI), a leading supplier of smart glasses and Augmented Reality (AR) technology and products, is pleased to announce that it has developed a new micro-touch manufacturing technique within its optical waveguide fabrication processes, an advancement that will allow for better optical performance, higher yields and greater unit production rates in general.

At Vuzix’ state-of-the-art waveguide manufacturing facility, the production of waveguides is a complex multi-step process performed in class 1000 clean room environments using highly customized equipment designed to support the exacting requirements needed to produce in volume the high-quality waveguides required for imaging purposes in smart glasses. Over the past 14 years, Vuzix has continued to enhance its waveguide manufacturing capabilities through its development and use of new equipment and processes to improve yields, add features, increase performance, and boost production rates. The recent introduction of micro-touch manufacturing techniques during the waveguide imprinting process not only improves yield by reducing the forces that can distort substrates during the imprinting process, but also allows for the introduction of more fragile substrates such as polymers or thinner glass.

Business Transactions

This week's top funding events, acquisitions, and partnerships across industrial value chains.

🇺🇸 General Catalyst Invests $120 Million Into Re:Build Manufacturing

🔖 Topics: Funding Event
🏢 Organizations: ReBuild Manufacturing, General Catalyst

Venture-capital firm General Catalyst has invested $120 million into Re:Build Manufacturing to have the startup holding 13 U.S. industrial and engineering businesses serve as a one-stop-shop for clients’ manufacturing needs and help new companies make products on American soil.

The investment comes after Cambridge, Mass.-based General Catalyst published a blog post last year outlining a thesis to back companies that could make critical systems like supply chains more resilient amid unstable geopolitics.

🇺🇸 Guidewheel raises $31M Series B to scale AI-powered FactoryOps across factory floors globally

🏢 Organizations: Guidewheel, Decarbonization Partners, Ecolab

Guidewheel, the leader in AI-powered FactoryOps, raised an oversubscribed $31 million Series B funding round led by Decarbonization Partners, a partnership between BlackRock and Temasek. Ecolab, Rethink Impact, and GSBackers also participated in this round, alongside existing investors Greycroft and Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV), among others.

Guidewheel provides the first way to bring AI to the factory floor at scale—every machine, in every factory. Inspired by the universal truth that every machine on the factory floor uses power, Guidewheel starts with non-invasive sensors that simply clip like a smartwatch on the power draw of any machine to bring its real-time “heartbeat” into a connected, AI-powered FactoryOps platform. Guidewheel empowers teams to reduce lost production time, increase efficiency, and enhance performance over time, delivering fast, concrete ROI through its technology, with customers reporting an average of 41% more production from their existing assets. Within the same FactoryOps platform, Guidewheel builds in all the tools manufacturers need to track and manage energy and carbon towards sustainability goals.

Guidewheel’s recent momentum has been marked by acquiring some of the world’s leading manufacturers as customers, including General Motors, Igloo, Kimberly Clark, JELD-WEN, DRiV/Tenneco, CEMIX, TricorBraun, Reliance Steel & Aluminum, Madison Industries, BorgWarner, U.S. Steel, Berry Global, Myers Industries, and Johnson & Johnson.

🇨🇦 CruxOCM closes $23.3-million CAD Series A led by Microsoft’s venture fund

🏢 Organizations: CruxOCM, Microsoft

Calgary-based startup CruxOCM, which provides software that automates the operations of industrial control rooms in the energy sector, has raised a $23.3-million CAD ($17 million USD) Series A round led by M12, Microsoft’s venture fund. The round saw participation from other new investors, including natural gas company Oneok, Raven Indigenous Capital Partners, and EIC Rose Rock Fund, as well as backing from return investors including Angular Ventures, Bullpen Capital, Root Ventures, Industry Ventures, Cendana Capital, Pipeline Capital Partners, and Golden Ventures.

CruxOCM said the Series A round brings its total capital raised to date up to $37 million CAD ($27 million USD). The investment will enable CruxOCM to bring its co-pilot offering to more control rooms across the energy sector, CEO and co-founder Vicki Knott said in a statement.

🇺🇸 AI Innovator UptimeAI Raises $14M to Drive North American Expansion

🏢 Organizations: UptimeAI, WestBridge Capital

UptimeAI, the world’s first AI-based plant monitoring software for industrial businesses announces it has raised $14 million in Series A funding to boost its North American operations. WestBridge Capital led the round, with participation from Emergent Ventures and Aditya Birla Ventures.

This latest round of funding will significantly support UptimeAI’s rapid expansion plans across North America and will help position the company as the market leader in boosting efficiency and reliability in U.S. manufacturing and processing sectors.

🇺🇸 Shinkong Invests $10M in Ambercycle's New Facility to Commercialize Circular Polyester Innovation

🏢 Organizations: Ambercycle, Shinkong

Shinkong Synthetic Fibers Corporation, a global leader in polyester production, has invested $10 million in Ambercycle’s first state-of-the-art commercial facility. Shinkong’s contribution to the leading material science company’s facility will help expand global production capacity for its premium material made from end-of-life textiles. It builds on three years of collaboration that harnessed Ambercycle’s molecular regeneration technology and Shinkong’s extensive experience in the premium polyester market to jointly manufacture regenerated yarns and meet the growing demand for cycora® material.

🇫🇮 Collo secures €5M to lower emissions from dairy plants

🏢 Organizations: Collo, SEB Greentech Venture Capital, FORWARD one

Collo, a Finnish startup offering IoT analysers for optimising industrial liquid processes, has just raised €5 million in growth financing. It was co-led by Swedish SEB Greentech Venture Capital and Dutch deep tech investor FORWARD.one (which backed Rocsys and Sensorfact) and joined by an existing investor, Danish deep tech investor Scale Capital.

This investment will allow Collo to expand its solution globally, helping its client to achieve their strategic goals for reducing their emissions and improving their sustainability.

Mars to Acquire Kellanova

🔖 Topics: Acquisition
🏢 Organizations: Mars, Kellanova

Mars, Incorporated, a family-owned, global leader in pet care, snacking and food, and Kellanova (NYSE: K), a leading company in global snacking, international cereal and noodles, North American plant-based foods and frozen breakfast foods, today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Mars has agreed to acquire Kellanova for $83.50 per share in cash, for a total consideration of $35.9 billion, including assumed net leverage.1 The transaction price represents a premium of approximately 44% to Kellanova’s unaffected 30-trading day volume weighted average price and a premium of approximately 33% to Kellanova’s unaffected 52-week high as of August 2, 2024. The total consideration represents an acquisition multiple of 16.4x LTM adjusted EBITDA as of June 29, 2024.

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