Record Efficiency in Renewable Energy Production

Reducing environmental impact will require new materials, chemistries, and production methods. Governments and companies are unleashed to do just that.

David Rogers

Mar 17, 2024

Shop Talk

Capturing this week's zeitgeist

Kaizen Blitz

📋 TIME and Statista have named 250 companies reducing environmental impact
🚙🔋🔌 EV charging speed, range, and thermal management remain challenges
- LG Energy and Qualcomm form collaboration for battery management
- Samsung SDI to mass-produce batteries that can be 80% charged in nine minutes
- Volvo Cars has partnered up with Breathe Battery Technologies to “reduce the time it takes to charge your fully electric Volvo from 10 to 80 percent charging state by as much as 30 percent”
- Stanford, MIT and the Toyota Research Institute conducted experiments applying machine learning techniques to battery testing
- In large-scale systems like DC EV chargers, real-time temperature monitoring facilitated by control systems plays a crucial role in active thermal management
- Breakthroughs, fundamentals, status, and promise of sodium-ion batteries
🏭💰 Factory investments remain strong in energy infrastructure, semiconductors, and aerospace
- Schaeffler to Build E-Axle Factory in Ohio
- Siemens Energy will spend $149.8 million to build a large power transformer factory in North Carolina
- Vishay Intertechnology on plans for its acquired Welsh chip making factory
- Silicon Box to Invest €3.2B in a Semiconductor Fab in Italy
- GE Aerospace plans to invest $650 million in its manufacturing facilities

Assembly Line

This week's most influential Industry 4.0 media.

How Infinited Fiber Raised $43m Amidst Textile Recycling Uncertainty

✍️ Author: Brooke Roberts-Islam
🔖 Topics: Circular Economy
🏭 Vertical: Textiles
🏢 Organizations: Infinited Fiber

In the wake of Renewcell’s bankruptcy announcement, some concluded that fashion brands weren’t ready to make the leap to adopting ‘circular textiles’, but IFC’s financing round hinged on brands purchasing in advance the majority of the recycled fiber capacity from the first years of the scaled factory’s output. So, how do Renewcell’s and IFC’s technologies and business models differ? How might IFC avoid the commercial challenges faced by Renewcell (who also count H&M as an investor)?

Infinited Fiber Company’s Co-founder and CEO, Petri Alava, went on to point out significant differences in the feedstock sources, funding and commercialisation model of IFC, compared to Renewcell. Regarding feedstocks, he explains: “we are obtaining post-consumer textiles discarded clothing, as well as dust airborne textile fibers from mechanical textile recycling factories in Turkey and North Africa. IFC has secured it’s used clothing and textile waste from Europe-based garment collectors and sorters.

RAG in an Industrial Setting

🔖 Topics: Generative AI

How We Are Building a Self-Sustaining Open-Source Business in the Cloud Era

🔖 Topics: Open Source
🏢 Organizations: Timescale

Back in 2018, Timescale first announced how we planned to build a self-sustaining open-source business in the cloud era and that we had started developing features under a new, source-available license called the Timescale License (TSL). At the time, the TSL was a radical idea: a source-available license that was open-source in spirit but that contained a main restriction: preventing companies from offering software licensed under the TSL via a hosted database-as-a-service.

The TSL, like the Elastic License before it and the Confluent Community License (coincidentally launched around the same time), are examples of what we call “Cloud Protection Licenses.” These licenses attempt to maintain an open-source spirit but recognize that the cloud has increasingly become the dominant form of open-source commercialization.

Take a tour of the Rivian EV Manufacturing Plant, and go behind the scenes with founder RJ Scaringe

🏢 Organizations: Rivian, Kawasaki Robotics

AI-Powered Manufacturing: Creating a Data-Driven Factory

🏢 Organizations: Eigen Innovations, AllGoVision

How to Implement a Remote Validation Process

✍️ Author: Christina Fuges
🔖 Topics: Virtual Commissioning

Here is how a Rochester, New York-based, family-owned mold builder, Accede Mold & Tool, innovated to overcome obstacles presented by travel restrictions and customer budget constraints by developing and implementing a remote mold validation process. While born out of necessity during the emergence of the pandemic, the process persists and has delivered considerable time and cost savings for its customers and benefits for the mold builder.

For remote mold validation, Accede has a carefully curated kit that contains a decently powered computer for graphics, cam links to turn regular high-performance cameras into webcams, a USB microscope for inspecting plastic parts under magnification, studio lights, mounts and noise-canceling headsets for the production environment. This kit ensures Accede is always prepared for remote mold validations.

The Future of Sustainable Design with Mars and Ansys

🏢 Organizations: Mars, Ansys

New Product Introduction

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

Covariant Announces a Universal AI Platform for Robots

✍️ Author: Evan Ackerman
🏢 Organizations: Covariant

Covariant is announcing RFM-1, which the company describes as a robotics foundation model that gives robots the “human-like ability to reason.” “Foundation model” means that RFM-1 can be trained on more data to do more things—at the moment, it’s all about warehouse manipulation because that’s what it’s been trained on, but its capabilities can be expanded by feeding it more data. “Our existing system is already good enough to do very fast, very variable pick and place,” says Covariant co-founder Pieter Abbeel. “But we’re now taking it quite a bit further. Any task, any embodiment—that’s the long-term vision. Robotics foundation models powering billions of robots across the world.” From the sound of things, Covariant’s business of deploying a large fleet of warehouse automation robots was the fastest way for them to collect the tens of millions of trajectories (how a robot moves during a task) that they needed to train the 8 billion parameter RFM-1 model.

Agility Robotics Brings Operational Visibility to Deployment of Digit Fleets with the Launch of Agility Arc™

🏢 Organizations: Agility Robotics

In its first iteration, Agility Arc will provide customers with operational visibility into critical KPIs like uptime, throughput, Mean Time Between Incidents (MTBI), and robot status, allowing customers to understand what’s happening in the workcell and how Digit is performing. Additionally, Agility Arc will provide industry standard APIs to simplify integration with existing Warehouse Management Systems (WMS), Warehouse Execution Systems (WES), and Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) among others.

Magnetic Levitation on an existing rail

🏭 Vertical: Railroad

Lyten Achieves Manufacturing Milestone; Now Producing Lithium-Sulfur Batteries At Greater Than 90% Yield

🏭 Vertical: Electrical Equipment
🏢 Organizations: Lyten

Lyten, a supermaterials application company and the leader in lithium-sulfur battery technology, announced it is consistently surpassing 90 percent yield from its automated battery production line, confirming the manufacturability of its lithium-sulfur battery utilizing a sulfur cathode and lithium metal anode. Additionally, the lithium-sulfur battery cell has proven to be highly tolerant of metallic contamination, significantly reducing the capital equipment and operational costs associated with preventing metal contamination in today’s leading battery chemistries, namely NMC and LFP.

CSIRO achieves record efficiency for next-gen roll-to-roll printed solar cells

🏢 Organizations: CSIRO, University of Cambridge, Monash University, University of Sydney, University of New South Wales

Scientists from Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, have led an international team to a clean energy breakthrough by setting a new efficiency record for fully roll-to-roll printed solar cells. Printed onto thin plastic films, this lightweight and flexible solar technology will help meet the growing demand for renewable energy by expanding the boundaries of where solar cells can be used. The team demonstrated performances for solar cells of 15.5% efficiency on a small scale and 11% for a 50 cm2 module, which is a record for fully printed solar cells.

CSIRO is actively seeking industry partners to further develop and commercialise this technology.

Industrial Policy

How governments are shaping the future industrial landscape.

🇲🇾 Malaysia: the surprise winner from US-China chip wars

✍️ Author: Mercedes Ruehl

As companies around the world look for a back-up to China to protect themselves from geopolitical disruptions — a strategy known as China plus one — Malaysia is becoming a surprise investment destination. It has a 50-year history in the “back end” of the semiconductor manufacturing supply chain: packaging, assembling and testing chips. But it has ambitions to move up to the front end of a $520bn global industry that powers everything from televisions to smartphones and electric vehicles. That includes higher value activities such as wafer fabrication and integrated circuit design.

Developing Malaysia’s semiconductor industry and workforce into this higher value manufacturing is a “critical goal,” says prime minister Anwar Ibrahim in an interview with the Financial Times.

🇮🇳 Govt to support semiconductor industry expansion across India

The Government of India is open to give opportunities to any state that would like to focus on the semiconductor industry, Union Minister of Railways, Communications and Electronics & Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw said at the inauguration of the Qualcomm design center in Chennai. His comments come a day after the ground breaking ceremonies for three semiconductor projects, including the Tata Group’s $11 billion semiconductor fab facility in Dholera in Gujarat, the Rs 27,000 crore chip assembly, testing, marking and packaging facility at Morigaon in Assam and Murugappa Group’s CG Power’s Rs 7,600 crore chip assembly facility at Sanand in Gujarat.

Also, one of the reasons that these regions were being selected for the manufacturing units was because of the chemical hub situated in Dahej in Gujarat, Vaishnaw said.

🇺🇸 A Foundry’s Closure Devastated This Tennessee Town But a New Lithium Plant Is Giving It Hope

✍️ Author: Jackie Duda
🏢 Organizations: Piedmont Lithium

The Tennessee Lithium project, announced on September 1, 2022, will focus on converting lithium hydroxide to power the cathodes in lithium-ion vehicle batteries. Tennessee was selected for its central role in America’s “Battery Belt” and as a key contributor to the U.S. electrification economy. “It came down to multiple factors, the first being the quality of the site,” said Blair. The North Etowah Industrial Park has excellent rail access and is near other EV battery component manufacturers in the “battery belt.” Etowah City Manager Russ Blair told the local paper in September 2022 that Piedmont planned to invest nearly $600 million into the county.

“Shortly after we announced the location for Tennessee Lithium, we were honored to be selected in October 2022 for a $141.7 million U.S. Department of Energy grant to support project construction,” said Piedmont spokesperson Erin Sanders.

Business Transactions

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

🇺🇸🚘 Applied Intuition Grows to $6 Billion Valuation, Securing $250 Million in Series E Funding to Advance Vehicle Software and AI Capabilities

🔖 Topics: Funding Event
🏢 Organizations: Applied Intuition, Lux Capital, Porsche

Applied Intuition, Inc., a vehicle software supplier for automotive, trucking, construction, mining, agriculture, and other industries, has raised a $250 million Series E financing round at a $6 billion valuation. The round was led by Bilal Zuberi at Lux Capital (Series C lead investor), Elad Gil (Series D lead investor), and strategic investor Porsche Investments Management.

The company will use the financing to make significant investments in generative AI to unlock substantial value for customers and partners. With recent advancements in large language models (LLMs), Applied Intuition is uniquely positioned to help its customers revolutionize the vehicle software development process. The company will continue to recruit the world’s best software and AI engineers to further expand its offerings that enable its customers to have the world’s most advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and automated driving (AD) solutions.

Read more at PR Newswire

🇺🇸📐 Luminary Cloud Emerges from Stealth, Empowering R&D with Realtime Engineering

🏢 Organizations: Luminary Cloud, Sutter Hill Ventures

Luminary Cloud, a pioneer in realtime engineering, announced its official launch out of stealth. A computer-aided engineering (CAE) SaaS platform, Luminary empowers smarter and faster design cycles, allowing engineers to develop better products in a fraction of the time. Backed by Sutter Hill Ventures, which led its $115 million funding, Luminary’s customers span industries including aerospace and defense, automotive, sporting goods, industrial equipment, and more.

Luminary’s platform makes it possible to run high-fidelity simulations 100 times faster than legacy vendors by leveraging the raw speed of GPU- and cloud-based processing. Its proprietary simulation platform is powered by massively parallel NVIDIA GPU clusters in the cloud. With hyper-fast and accurate simulations, engineers can iterate and test a variety of scenarios, answer more questions, and use these insights to optimize product design.

Read more at PR Newswire

🇺🇸🔏 Nozomi Networks Secures $100 Million Investment to Accelerate Mission to Defend the World's Critical Infrastructure from Cyber Threats

🏢 Organizations: Nozomi Networks, Mitsubishi Electric, Schneider Electric

Nozomi Networks Inc., the worldwide leader in OT and IoT security, announced a $100 million Series E funding round to help accelerate innovative cyber defenses and expand cost-efficient go-to-market expansion globally. This latest round includes investments from Mitsubishi Electric, a global leader in digital manufacturing, electronics and electrical equipment and Schneider Electric, a global leader in digital automation and energy management. They join a growing list of OT original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) who have invested in Nozomi Networks, including previous investors Honeywell and Johnson Controls.

Read more at PR Newswire

🇺🇸🌎⚡ Quaise Energy Raises $21 Million to Accelerate Terawatt-Scale Deep Geothermal Energy

🏢 Organizations: Quaise Energy, Prelude Ventures, Safar Partners, Mitsubishi, MIT

Quaise Energy, the company unlocking terawatt-scale geothermal, announced the closing of a $21 Million Series A1 financing round led by Prelude Ventures and Safar Partners. Mitsubishi Corporation and Standard Investments are among several new investors participating in the round. This latest funding will enhance Quaise field operations and strengthen the company’s supply chain position, while ongoing product development will continue with pre-existing capital.

Quaise is uniquely positioned to harness deep geothermal energy worldwide at 3-20 km below the Earth’s surface. To achieve such a feat, the company has advanced a novel technique to vaporize rock using high-power microwaves in the millimeter range, based on more than a decade of research at MIT and recent testing at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The original MIT experiments have now been scaled up 100x, with field demonstrations commencing this year.

🇺🇸🪨 Furno Secures $6.5 Million Seed Funding to Cement a Carbon Neutral Future

🏢 Organizations: Furno, Energy Capital Ventures

Furno, a startup dedicated to decarbonizing the cement production industry, announced the close of an oversubscribed $6.5M seed funding round and introduced its revolutionary, end-to-end cement production unit, the Furno Brick. Furno’s oversubscribed round was led by Energy Capital Ventures (ECV) and joined by O’Shaughnessy Ventures, Cantos and Neotribe. Breakthrough Energy participated in earlier, non-dilutive funding of the company. This funding will enable the company to continue to scale its technology, provide more customers with samples to garner feedback and, perhaps most significantly, aid in the development of the Furno Brick.

🇺🇸🖨️ Fluent Metal Launches with $5.5M Funding to Bring Liquid Metal Printing to Life

🏢 Organizations: Fluent Metal, E15

Fluent Metal is developing production-grade liquid metal printing to remove barriers to entry into metal additive manufacturing, while allowing for unmatched scalability and process tunability. The company is launching out of stealth with an additional $3.2M in venture capital funding, led by E15 with participation from Pillar VC and industry angels, bringing the total funding to $5.5M. Fluent Metal’s drop-on-demand approach is compatible with most metals, including refractories, and enables the creation of parts in a single-step process, minimizing variability. It is energy efficient: using less starting material and producing no waste–making it far more sustainable than current powder-based metal 3D printers.

Read more at PR Newswire

🇩🇪⚗️ Quantistry bags €3M to foster R&D innovation through AI and Quantum

🏢 Organizations: Quantistry, Ananda Impact Ventures, BASF

Berlin-based Quantistry, a provider of cloud-native chemical simulation platforms, announced on Tuesday that it has secured €3M in a fresh funding round led by Ananda Impact Ventures. Other investors, including Chemovator, the business incubator of BASF, IBB Ventures, and a Family Office, also participated in the round. The capital injection will boost Quantistry’s efforts to transform chemical and material R&D with Quantum and AI.

Quantistry offers an intuitive cloud-native chemical simulation platform tailored to designing and discovering new sustainable materials. The company does this through its computational platform, which integrates quantum technologies, physics-based simulations, and machine learning. By leveraging quantum-based simulations, multiscale modelling, and AI-driven insights, the company’s tool enhances the optimisation, discovery, and design of innovative materials, offering unprecedented benefits to industries seeking sustainable solutions.

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