Save Industrial Process Heat for a Later Day

Use raw sensor data and to evaluate robotics policies across millions of scenarios. Real-time, in-process monitoring of forming forces. The restart of Three Mile Island nuclear plant.

Sep 22, 2024

Shop Talk

Capturing this week's zeitgeist

The recent commercialization of firebricks, which can store heat of all temperatures and cost less than one-tenth per unit storage capacity the cost of batteries, suggests a large-scale solution to addressing industrial process heat emissions is possible. Firebrick systems powered by renewable energy could be used for up to 90% of industrial process heat applications, according to the Stanford study.

With data center demand heating up to host AI and cloud computing applications, Constellation Energy and Microsoft have signed a power deal to help resurrect the Three Mile Island nuclear plant.

Kaizen Blitz

🚦 Andon Status
- 🟢 Stellantis Deploys AI-enabled Innovations from Autodesk, Inbolt, and wheel.me to Boost Manufacturing Efficiency and Sustainability
- 🟡 Honda rethinks manufacturing as it overhauls Ohio plants
- 🚨 Wolfsburg fears loss of identity as Germany’s largest private employer moves to break its job security pledge
📊 Survey Says
- 🚙 According to the Chicago Fed, despite the expected change in the production mix of light vehicle types, the footprint of auto assembly plants in North America is expected to remain essentially unchanged.
🗣️ Town Hall
- 💿 Bertrand Loy, CEO of Entegris, the world’s largest electronics materials company discusses his US growth path.
- ⛓️ Michel Morvan, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder at Cosmo Tech, unveils Gen AI to Optimise the Supply Chain
- ✈️ Boeing CFO Brian West has issued a companywide memo detailing the steps it is taking to conserve cash during the IAM strike.
🏆 Golden Part
- 🚙 The patent application from Tesla Inc. for a “Modular Vehicle Architecture for Assembly Vehicles” has been released by WIPO.
🏭💰 Production Planning
- 🔋♻️ AE Elemental Opens Advanced Lithium-Ion Battery Recycling Facility in Poland
- ⚗️ Covestro to build new Thermoplastic Polyurethane application development center in Guangzhou, China
🔬💸 Research Hypothesis
- The Wazoku Crowd Challenge is seeking New Approaches to Cost-Effective Lithium Extraction from High Salinity Brine for a $30,000 prize.
- The 1X World Model Challenge, tasks researchers to predict future first-person observations of the EVE Android with three challenges: Compression Challenge ($10k prize), Sampling Challenge ($10k prize), Evaluation Challenge (upcoming).

Assembly Line

This week's most influential Industry 4.0 media.

Palmer Luckey Is Bringing Anduril Smarts to Microsoft’s Military Headset

✍️ Author: Will Knight
🔖 Topics: Augmented Reality
🏢 Organizations: Anduril, Microsoft, US Army

While known primarily for drones and air defenses, Anduril’s core offering is Lattice, a suite of software that powers those tools and a platform that can integrate with third-party systems. With today’s announcement, Lattice will be implemented in the Integrated Visual Augmentation System headset. Developed by Microsoft for the US military in 2021 and based on the company’s Hololens system, IVAS is an augmented-reality display that blends virtual information with a user’s view of the real world.

While virtual and augmented reality headsets remain a tough sell for the general public, Luckey says the US Army has been eager to experiment with the technology, primarily as a training tool but also as a way to deliver information more efficiently in critical situations. “The military is different,” Luckey says. “If you have an augmented-reality display that can make you 20 percent more lethal or make someone 10 percent safer, that’s a bigger improvement than just about any piece of gear you could give you.”

Siemens Energy Boosts Power Generation Maintenance Creaform 3D technologies

🏢 Organizations: Creaform, Siemens Energy

1X’s Generative World Model for Robot Interactions

✍️ Authors: Jack Monas, Eric Jang
🔖 Topics: Generative AI, Humanoid
🏢 Organizations: 1X

World models solve a very practical and yet often overlooked challenge when building general-purpose robots: evaluation. If you train a robot to perform 1000 unique tasks, it is very hard to know whether a new model has made the robot better at all 1000 tasks, compared to a prior model. Even the same model weights can experience a rapid degradation in performance in a matter of days due to subtle changes in the environment background or ambient lighting.

Physics-based simulation (Bullet, Mujoco, Isaac Sim, Drake) are a reasonable way to quickly test robot policies. They are resettable and reproducible, allowing researchers to carefully compare different control algorithms. However, these simulators are mostly designed for rigid body dynamics and require a lot of manual asset authoring.

We’re taking a radically new approach to evaluation of general-purpose robots: learning a simulator directly from raw sensor data and using it to evaluate our policies across millions of scenarios. By learning a simulator directly from real data, you can absorb the full complexity of the real world without manual asset creation.

Artificial Grass Technology: How Fake Grass is Made

In-process, real-time monitoring of forming forces in rotary draw bending process

✍️ Authors: Xu He, Torgeir Welo, Jun Ma
🔖 Topics: Metal Forming, Rotary Draw Bending
🏢 Organizations: Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Monitoring forming forces in metal forming processes is essential for analyzing process behaviors, mechanisms, and defect detection. This is particularly relevant in aluminum tube bending processes, where the dimensional quality of the formed product is sensitive to multiple upstream and in-process variables. This research presents a method for real-time, in-process monitoring of forming forces in rotary draw bending (RDB). By developing a set of innovative forming tools (clamp die, bend die, pressure die, etc.) with directional force sensors embedded, key forming forces are measured. Through a series of experiments, the measurement method was validated by analyzing both measured forces and calculated moments, demonstrating high measurement consistency. The systematic examination of measurement variations provided insights into the reliability and robustness of the method. Moreover, comparison with FE results supported the accuracy of the measurements. Additionally, laser-based measurements showed a good correlation between the measured springback angle and the calculated moment during bending. These findings lay the groundwork for the industrial implementation of in-process force measurements in RDB, advancing the production of tube components.

New Product Introduction

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

🦾 Vention launches MachineMotion AI, an AI-enabled automation controller for robotics and industrial applications

🏢 Organizations: Vention, NVIDIA

Vention, the company behind the cloud-based Manufacturing Automation Platform (MAP), is launching an AI-enabled motion controller, MachineMotion AI. This 3rd-generation controller, built on NVIDIA accelerated computing, is designed to significantly simplify the development and deployment of robotics applications for manufacturers of all sizes.

MachineMotion AI is compatible with leading robot brands, including Universal Robots, FANUC, and ABB. It delivers up to 3,000W of power and drives up to 30 servo motors via EtherCAT. Powered by the NVIDIA Jetson platform for edge AI and robotics, MachineMotion AI advances AI-enabled robots with NVIDIA GPU-accelerated path planning and the ability to run 2D/3D perception models trained in synthetic and physical environments.

Read more at PR Newswire

🖥️ Paperless Parts Wingman™: Your New AI-Powered Partner in Quoting

🏢 Organizations: Paperless Parts

Wingman is Paperless Parts’ new secure, proprietary, AI-powered automation tool inside of our quoting platform designed to arm you with the right information to make it faster and easier to get to the meat of quoting. Wingman automatically extracts critical details from quote packages (prints, models, emails, etc.), so instead of worrying about making a mistake, you can focus on what really matters: delivering accurate quotes, quickly. Consider it an extension of your team—an intelligent assistant that has your back 24/7, making sure you never miss an important detail.

Wingman recognizes over 10,000 ASTM, AMS, MIL-SPEC, NADCAP, and OEM-specific process/material specifications, highlights them on prints, and presents their definitions right next to the print. Wingman identifies UTS and metric thread specifications, which could indicate taps, inserts, or other hardware requirements. Wingman identifies 29 common process keywords, including anodizing, welding, and heat treating.

💿 Electroninks Launches World-First Copper MOD Ink to Revolutionize Advanced Semiconductor Packaging

🏢 Organizations: Electroninks

Electroninks, the leader in metal organic decomposition (MOD) inks for additive manufacturing and advanced semiconductor packaging, announced the launch of the company’s advanced conductive copper ink line. The new copper ink extends Electroninks’ global-leading portfolio of metal complex inks while providing further manufacturing flexibility and lower total ownership costs to customers.

A high-demand application for the new copper ink is seed layer printing for fine-line metallization and RDL formation in combination with the company’s proprietary iSAP™ process. For this application, Electroninks copper ink effectively displaces industry use of electroless (e-less) copper plating and physical vapor deposition (PVD) tie layers while achieving a significant increase in manufacturing throughput and a vast reduction in ESG footprint. Compared to legacy methods (PVD and e-less), ink-based additive printing uses a fraction of the water and energy, factory footprint and CAPEX, thus providing customers with the lowest total cost of ownership and highest ROI on the market.

Business Transactions

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

🇺🇸 Twelve Announces $645 Million in Funding Led by TPG to Transform CO2 into Jet Fuel and Electrochemicals at Scale

🔖 Topics: Funding Event
🏢 Organizations: Twelve, TPG Rise Climate

Twelve, the carbon transformation company that converts captured carbon dioxide into valuable chemicals, fuels, and other essential products typically made from fossil fuels, today announced $645 million in funding. This raise is a strategic mix of capital which includes $400 million in project equity led by TPG Rise Climate, $200 million in Series C financing, and an additional $45 million in credit facilities from leading funders in the renewable energy sector marking this as one of the largest financing rounds to date in the e-fuels space.

The funding accelerates Twelve’s goals of defossilizing manufacturing processes, focusing first on emissions generated by aviation. This includes the completion of AirPlant™ One, Twelve’s inaugural sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) plant located in Moses Lake, Washington, which is expected to begin production in 2025. AirPlant One is the first of many facilities throughout the country to make E-Jet® fuel, using the company’s patented technology to produce SAF derived from biogenic CO2, water, and renewable energy sources which achieves lifecycle emissions up to 90% lower than conventional fossil jet fuel.

Read more at PR Newswire

🇫🇷 Inbolt bags €15M to sharpen industrial robots’ intelligence

🏢 Organizations: Inbolt, Exor

In a world where automation is key to staying competitive, one startup is helping manufacturers overcome long-standing barriers. Inbolt, a Paris-based pioneer in real-time robot guidance solutions, has secured €15M in a Series A funding round led by Exor Ventures, to develop AI-powered vision for industrial robots. This funding will drive Inbolt’s mission to revolutionize factory automation through cutting-edge AI-powered software that gives robotic arms the ability to adapt in real-time to their surroundings.

The latest funding round, led by Exor Ventures, the early-stage investment arm of Exor N.V., will accelerate Inbolt’s research and development efforts, helping the company expand its operations in the US and Japan. Existing investors such as MIG Capital (Germany), SOSV (US), BNP Paribas Développement, and Bpifrance also participated in the round, bringing the total amount raised to €20M. Notably, Exor Ventures is the largest shareholder in companies like Ferrari and Stellantis, linking Inbolt to a broader network of industrial giants.

🇮🇱 Cybord Raises $8.7 Million Series A to Expand First-of-its-Kind Visual AI Electronic Component Quality and Traceability Solution, Pioneering the Next Generation of Electronics Manufacturing

🏢 Organizations: Cybord, Capri Ventures

Cybord, the visual AI solution ensuring electronic component quality, authenticity, and traceability, announced that it has secured $8.7 million in Series A funding led by Capri Ventures, with participation from Ocean Azul Partners and existing investors IL Ventures and NextLeap Ventures, among other new and current investors. Partnered with leading manufacturers including Flex and Siemens, Cybord is integrated into over 60 manufacturing lines worldwide, inspecting millions of electronic components daily. This newest funding will be used to accelerate the company’s growth and further global distribution of its transformative solution.

Using deep learning and AI algorithms, Cybord analyzes and inspects 100% of electronic components on PCBA powering everything from electric vehicles to data centers. The Cybord solution addresses the industry’s critical need to confront electronic component quality to prevent damaging product condition, consumer trust, and manufacturers’ bottom lines. Until now, electronic component quality and security have largely been overlooked, leading to increased occurrences of defects and costly recalls, which hit a seven-year high in 2023. This unreliable state of electronic component quality results in time-consuming and costly reworking and scrapping of electronic boards and products, the allocation of valuable capital in anticipation of warranty claims, and costly recalls worth millions to billions of dollars in lost profits.

Read more at PR Newswire

🇺🇸 Tidal Metals Announces $8.5 Million Series Seed Funding Led by DCVC for Revolutionary Technology to Safely and Economically Extract Magnesium Metal from Seawater

🏢 Organizations: Tidal Metals, DCVC

Tidal Metals announced the completion of its $8.5 million Series Seed funding round led by DCVC with participation from First Spark Ventures and Bidra Innovation Ventures. The financing will fund the development and construction of a commercial pilot plant to demonstrate Tidal Metals’ breakthrough technology for extracting primary magnesium metal from seawater.

Tidal Metals has developed a revolutionary technology that will produce magnesium metal at competitive prices using a carbon neutral and environmentally harmless process. Magnesium is the second most abundant metal in seawater, averaging 1.3 kilograms per cubic meter. However, historical techniques that relied on chemical extraction proved to be economically uncompetitive and environmentally harmful. Without new innovations, the world cannot recover any of the magnesium contained in discharged desalination brine each year, estimated at over one hundred times the current global magnesium production of one million tons per year.

Read more at PR Newswire

🇮🇱 Pickommerce Secures $3.4M Investment to Advance Innovative Robotic Piece-Picking Technology

🏢 Organizations: Pickommerce, IL Ventures

Pickommerce, a warehouse automation innovator, announced it has secured $3.4 million in funding to advance the development, production and marketing of its innovative PickoBot piece-picking robot. The funding round was led by IL Ventures, a fund focused on disruptive technologies for legacy industries, and includes InNegev, Fusion VC, the Israel Innovation Authority and strategic investor ZIM Ventures, the corporate venture arm of maritime shipping company ZIM Integrated Shipping Services Ltd (NYSE: ZIM).

With PickoBot, Pickommerce has delivered the missing link in achieving a fully autonomous warehouse workflow, providing a superior solution for various industries such as apparel, retail (consumer goods, food, DIY, electrical, etc.), e-commerce, pharmaceutical, agricultural and spare parts. PickoBot utilizes an advanced computer vision system powered by machine learning that enables the safe and intelligent packaging of objects of different sizes, weights and textures. It features multiple gripping methods in a single station, including vacuum, finger-based, and patented adhesive-based grippers. An AI-driven decision-making algorithm selects the optimal gripper and grasp configuration for each item. Pickommerce’s patent-protected technologies significantly increase the variety of products that can be handled by robots in logistics, as well as the level of autonomy those robots possess.

Read more at PR Newswire

CELUS Partners with Edge Impulse to Revolutionize AI-Driven Electronics Design

🔖 Topics: Partnership
🏢 Organizations: CELUS, Edge Impulse

CELUS, the leading provider of AI-powered electronics design automation solutions for developers, engineers, and component suppliers, and Edge Impulse, the leading platform for building, optimizing and deploying machine learning models and algorithms to edge devices, announced a strategic partnership aimed at transforming the landscape of electronics design and development.

The collaboration brings together the AI-assisted, CELUS Design Platform with Edge Impulse’s advanced ML development platform. The combination of the two companies’ technologies streamlines the design process, enhances efficiencies, and accelerates the time to market of innovative electronic products.

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