Machines Taste the Future Before You
Cultivated meat is hitting a factory near you while machines get a taste of wine on the manufacturing line. Advanced manufacturing technology remains hot within the US.
Assembly Line
Cultured Meat Is So Close You Can Almost Taste It
Date: March 28, 2022
Author: Dave Fusaro
Vertical: Food
Tweet | Pocket | Instapaper
The technology of cultured animal meats has come in a very short time. Prices have declined to the point that these products are competitive – although not on parity – with animal products. Pioneer Mosa Meat reportedly spent $280,000 to create the first cultured beef burger in 2013. Israel’s Future Meat Technologies claims to have reduced the production cost of a 4-oz. cultured (but partially plant-based) chicken breast to $7.50, and beef for less than $16 per pound.
Several companies are gearing up to make production quantities of their products. BlueNalu is completing a 40,000-sq.-ft. pilot facility in San Diego “that enables limited volumes under GMP conditions and global best practices in food safety,” a spokesperson told us. Israel’s Future Meat Technologies raised $347 million in investment back in December, the largest single fundraising to date for a company in the cultivated meat space, in part to build a U.S. plant. While Pioneer Memphis Meats, which has rebranded itself as Upside Foods, last November opened its Engineering, Production and Innovation Center (EPIC), claiming the 53,000 sq. ft. facility in Emeryville, Calif., is the most advanced cultivated meat production facility in the world.
Read more at Food Processing
Using machine learning techniques in wine quality testing
Date: April 20, 2022
Author: Dario Rodriguez
Vertical: Beverage
Tweet | Pocket | Instapaper
The Profiling capability from Thermo Scientific™ SampleManager™ LIMS software provides an innovative way for laboratories to predict test results using historical data and novel machine learning (ML)-based techniques. For example, a food and beverage company might apply the Profiling capability to enable supervised learning in the food production process. In this case, SampleManager LIMS would use historical data to gain an understanding of the critical variables that determine whether a product is safe for consumers. This holistic approach considers not only the values of the individual critical variables themselves, but also the relationships between them. If a sample were to be flagged as failing, the system would alert stakeholders in advance to issue adjustments or investigations to avoid any risk to finished products.
In a wine production facility, the result of the “Quality Test” is of utmost importance. The laboratory has great flexibility and control over the testing process, so they could use the Profiling capability to redefine the order of the standard tests conducted to a wine sample.
Read more at Thermo Fisher Blog
Moving mining forward: Reducing downtime during mill relining
Should the metaverse matter to me?
Date: April 19, 2022
Author: Angie Sticher
Topics: Metaverse
Tweet | Pocket | Instapaper
Combining digital twins with IIoT applications in a factory or on a job site garners what may be referred to as the Industrial metaverse. Although providing value of themselves, digital twins are most powerful when combined and used across multiple industries to improve processes, monitor equipment, conduct predictive maintenance and train employees.
Read more at Plant Engineering
Enhancing Your Machine Tool with Data
SDRs for IIoT, RF data, and manufacturing control
Date: April 20, 2022
Authors: Brendon McHugh, Simon Nditru
Topics: IIoT
Tweet | Pocket | Instapaper
The flexibility of SDR platforms allows each individual wireless link to be customized according to its operating conditions. It also allows a broad variety of digital signal processing techniques such as frequency hopping and modulation techniques to be implemented with ease. In addition, use of software-based components in SDRs helps to shorten the cycle of developing and evaluating new radio protocols used in Industry 4.0.
Read more at Electronic Products
Solving the mixed-model assembly line balancing problem type-I using a Hybrid Reactive GRASP
Date: April 19, 2022
Authors: Lakhdar Belkharroubi, Khadidja Yahyaoui
Tweet | Pocket | Instapaper
Balancing an assembly line is a critical problem in manufacturing systems, it aims to assign a set of assembly tasks or operations into a set of workstations in order to optimize different performance measures (Fathi et al., 2018). Workstations can be arranged in a straight assembly line, U-shaped assembly line, or parallel assembly line (see, Figure 1), and to move work-pieces between these workstations a transportation system is used, for example, a conveyor belt or any mechanical material handling system. The time taken by each workstation to accomplish all assembly tasks required by the work-piece is called cycle time. The assignment of assembly tasks into workstations is restricted by precedence relations that are presented in a diagram known as precedence graph which demonstrates all relations between tasks (Saif et al., 2014).
Read more at Production & Manufacturing Research
Surge Demand
Upside Foods raised $400M to build new manufacturing facilities for cultivated-meat in the US. A survey of engineers top pain points with custom manufacturing. US investment in advanced manufacturing technologies unlocks reshoring opportunities. Take a look at the top investors in industrial technology while Amazon launches a $1B fund to invest in warehouse automation.