Show the Prices Upfront for Industrial Technology

IMTS 2024 wrap-up, data center simulator-based reinforcement learning, autonomous distribution yards, and how vaporizing plastic bags and bottles creates the building blocks for recycled plastics.

Sep 15, 2024

Shop Talk

Capturing this week's zeitgeist

IMTS 2024 broke registration records while Exponential Industry’s recommendations remain undefeated. Big fanfare for Tormach on X.

Other notable launches:

Kawasaki Robotics Launches High Precision, Industrial-Grade Advanced Collaborative Robots
Universal Robots Shows Deep Learning-Based Part Detection for Machine Tending Cobots

Kaizen Blitz

🚦 Andon Status
- 🟢 SK Energy Co. to start commercial operations for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) next month to meet growing demand for the eco-friendly fuel.
- 🟡 The headache for Airbus is that it needs to reach and sustain a production rate of 14 A220s a month to break even on them, up from about six currently.
- 🟡 The Sisyphean task of making Polestar profitable sooner rather than later can’t be done by cost-cutting alone.
- 🚨 Boar’s Head closing Virginia plant linked to a deadly listeria outbreak.
🗣️ Town Hall
- Xometry’s CEO Randy Altschuler talks through the company’s long-term strategy for AI-driven additive manufacturing.
- What scared Ford’s CEO as he watched engineers dissect an electric car from BYD to reveal elegant, low-cost engineering.
- Tokyo Electron CEO, Toshiki Kawai, says TEL aims to strengthen its business collaboration with Korean partners Samsung and SK Hynix.
- Humera Malik, CEO of Canvass AI, discusses unlocking industrial AI.
- Tobias Pohl, CEO and Co-Founder of CELUS, explains how their Design Studio platform helps engineers select the right components and manufacturers to streamline the design process, from concept to production.
🏆 Golden Part
- Tesla has recently produced about 495,000 4680 cells per day to reach the 100 millionth milestone.
🏢💸 Corporate Development
- CATL is in advanced talks to buy Chinese solar panel manufacturer Das Solar, an acquisition that would mark the battery giant’s entry into photovoltaic module production.
🏭💰 Production Planning
- Stellantis invests over $400M in three Michigan facilities.

Assembly Line

This week's most influential Industry 4.0 media.

Simulator-based reinforcement learning for data center cooling optimization

✍️ Authors: Chi Zhou, Doris Gao, Lisa Rivalin, Andrew Grier
🏢 Organizations: Meta

Most of Meta’s existing data centers use outdoor air and evaporative cooling systems to maintain environmental conditions within the envelope of temperature between 65°F and 85°F (18°C and 30°C) and relative humidity between 13 and 80%. As water and energy are consumed in the conditioning of this air, optimizing the amount of supply airflow that has to be conditioned is a high priority in terms of improving operational efficiency.

The penthouse cooling system within Meta’s data centers (Source: Meta)

Since 2021, we have been leveraging AI to optimize the amount of airflow supply into data centers for cooling purposes. Using simulator-based reinforcement learning, we have, on average, reduced the supply fan energy consumption at one of the pilot regions by 20% and water usage by 4% across various weather conditions.

Behind the scenes as Outrider perfects the autonomous distribution yard

🏢 Organizations: Outrider
🔖 Topics: Autonomous Vehicle

Energy Singularity aims for nuclear fusion at half the cost of US rivals

✍️ Authors: Edward White, Wang Xueqiao
🏢 Organizations: Energy Singularity

Energy Singularity, founded in 2021, has been developing a small-scale tokamak, a machine expected to be at the heart of fusion power plants. The start-up has grown to about 135 employees and is targeting around $500mn in future fundraising rounds as it tries to develop its next-generation nuclear fusion device, the HH170, by 2027. It is set to be larger, generating significantly more power, and the company hopes to move to commercialise the technology before 2035.

Ye Yuming, Energy Singularity’s chief operating officer and co-founder, believes that rival US groups enjoy “a much more favourable” funding environment, Energy Singularity expects to be able to leverage China’s deep supply chains for key fusion materials, including the HTS material. The company said about 95 per cent of the materials for its first device, the Honghuang 70 or HH70, were locally made, highlighting the “long-term accumulation” of advantages in Chinese nuclear power technology.

How AMI Attachments boosts efficiency and combats welder shortage with robot offline programming

🏢 Organizations: Visual Components

Recurrent neural networks as virtual cavity pressure and temperature sensors in high-pressure die casting

✍️ Authors: Maximilian Rudack, Michael Rom, Lukas Bruckmeier
🔖 Topics: Long Short-term Memory
🏢 Organizations: RWTH Aachen University

High-pressure die casting (HPDC) is a permanent mold-based production technology that facilitates the casting of near net shape components from nonferrous alloys. The pressure and temperature conditions within the cavity impact the cast product quality during and after the conclusion of the die filling process. Die surface cavity sensors can deliver information describing the conditions at the die-casting interface. They are associated with high costs and limited service lifetimes below the achievable total cycle count of the die inserts and therefore ill-suited for industrial use cases. In this work, the suitability of long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks (RNN) for substituting physical cavity temperature and pressure sensors virtually after the production ramp-up or at the end of the sensor service life is investigated. Training LSTMs with data of 233 casting cycles with different process parameters provides networks which are then applied to 99 further cycles. The prediction accuracy is investigated for different time interval lengths in the solidification and cooling phase. For longer time intervals, the cavity pressure prediction deteriorates, potentially due to a highly individual and hardly ascertainable buildup of casting distortion and internal stresses. Overall, however, the accuracy of the developed LSTMs is excellent for the cavity temperatures and good for the cavity pressures.

New Product Introduction

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

Manufacturers Can Now Quickly Produce High-Quality Master Patterns for Investment Casting Production with New 3D Printing Build Processor from Stratasys and Materialise

🏢 Organizations: Stratasys, Materialise

In collaboration with Materialise, Stratasys Ltd. (NASDAQ: SSYS) announced the launch of the Stratasys Neo® Build Processor for Investment Casting, a unique solution designed to accelerate the production of high-quality investment casting master patterns.

This new build processor, developed for Stratasys Neo®450 and Neo®800 stereolithography (SLA) 3D printers, offers up to 50% faster file processing and significantly enhanced print speeds, streamlining the 3D printing workflow for manufacturers and service bureaus in the aerospace and other demanding industries.

3D printing master patterns can reduce the investment casting production time from weeks to days, potentially resulting in up to 75% time savings compared to traditional methods of manufacturing, including wax mold and CNC machining. The ability to rapidly produce intricate designs that were previously unachievable with conventional techniques opens up new possibilities for innovation in part design and functionality, specifically with small-series production runs.

Cyngn Expanding DriveMod Capabilities to Outdoor Operations In Response to Increased Demand

🏢 Organizations: Cyngn

Cyngn Inc. (Nasdaq: CYN) announced that its AI-powered autonomous driving solution, DriveMod, will be able to operate in outdoor environments. Organizations will be able to send the DriveMod Tugger on missions that go indoors and outdoors, giving facility managers even more opportunity to automate repetitive workflows and shift employees over to more interesting, higher-value tasks. By extending DriveMod’s capabilities outdoors, Cyngn provides organizations with a solution that eliminates bottlenecks in material movement, from transporting goods between outdoor storage areas to facilitating smoother transitions across multi-building facilities.

New process vaporizes plastic bags and bottles, yielding gases to make new, recycled plastics

✍️ Author: Robert Sanders
🔖 Topics: Recycling, Circular Economy
🏢 Organizations: University of California

A new chemical process can essentially vaporize plastics that dominate the waste stream today and turn them into hydrocarbon building blocks for new plastics.

The catalytic process, developed at the University of California, Berkeley, works equally well with the two dominant types of post-consumer plastic waste: polyethylene, the component of most single-use plastic bags; and polypropylene, the stuff of hard plastics, from microwavable dishes to luggage. It also efficiently degrades a mix of these types of plastics.

The process, if scaled up, could help bring about a circular economy for many throwaway plastics, with the plastic waste converted back into the monomers used to make polymers, thereby reducing the fossil fuels used to make new plastics. Clear plastic water bottles made of polyethylene tetraphthalate (PET), a polyester, were designed in the 1980s to be recycled this way. But the volume of polyester plastics is minuscule compared to that of polyethylene and polypropylene plastics, referred to as polyolefins.

Business Transactions

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

Reverion raises €56 million for serial production of renewable power plants

🔖 Topics: Funding Event
🏢 Organizations: Reverion, Energy Impact Partners, Honda

Reverion, a company building reversible, carbon-negative power plants, announced it had raised €56 million in Series A funding, including non-dilutive funding. The oversubscribed round was led by Energy Impact Partners (EIP) with participation from Honda and the European Innovation Council Fund (EIC Fund). Existing investors Extantia Capital, UVC Partners, Green Generation Fund, Doral Energy-Tech Ventures, and Possible Ventures also joined the round. This funding will enable Reverion to begin serial production of its power plants and meet over $100 million in customer pre-orders collected to date.

Reverion’s patented technology is paving the way to 100% renewable energy by using the full potential of biogas. Their reversible power plants overcome the limitations of conventional technologies for power generation from biogas, significantly increasing revenue for operators from the same biomass. Unlike conventional gas engines, which are inefficient and emit millions of tonnes of CO2 annually worldwide, Reverion’s fuel cell-based plants achieve up to 80% efficiency in power generation, doubling the electricity output of gas engines.

Reshape Automation Raises $5 Million in Seed Funding to Catalyze Industrial Automation Equipment and Services Adoption

🏢 Organizations: Reshape Automation, Ironspring Ventures

Reshape Automation, an AI-powered solution transforming industrial automation from discovery to deployment, has raised $5 million in seed funding. The round was led by Ironspring Ventures and included new investors Haystack, Supply Chain Ventures, Remus Capital, Expansion VC, and prominent angel investors including Amar Hanspal, former co-CEO of Autodesk, alongside existing investors Schematic Ventures and Bee Partners.

This funding milestone reinforces Reshape’s innovative approach to scaling industrial automation. Reshape’s platform consolidates and analyzes process data, tracks requirements, and aggregates demand and supply for automation equipment and services. With its recommendation engine, transparent pricing, and AI agents, the platform accelerates adoption, boosts transparency, and reduces risk for manufacturers and supply chain companies.

With this new capital, Reshape will accelerate the development and deployment of its product suite, the “Reshape Industrial Automation Hub”. Under this umbrella, Reshape is announcing two new products: Reshape Insights and Reshape Planner, and integrating its existing Reshape Market, which now features hundreds of automation products and solutions with plans to add thousands in the coming years.

Cerrion raises $5 million in funding to boost AI Video tech in manufacturing

🏢 Organizations: Cerrion, Y Combinator, Goat Capital

Zurich video AI startup Cerrion has raised $5 million in funding. The round was led by Y Combinator and Justin Kan’s Goat Capital, with additional participation from session.vc, Soma Capital, 10x Founders, Rebel Fund and renowned angel investors.

By automating tasks traditionally handled by skilled operators, Cerrion’s AI video-led technology helps manufacturers maintain productivity despite workforce shortages. It leverages standard CCTV cameras to learn and monitor production processes, automatically detecting and acting on deviations in real-time.

Litmus Edge Unlocks Industrial Data Potential With New AWS IoT SiteWise Integration

🔖 Topics: Partnership
🏢 Organizations: Litmus, AWS

Litmus, a leading industrial dataops company announced a new integration with Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) that enables industrial customers to unlock a wider range of equipment data and drive actionable business insights. By seamlessly integrating Litmus Edge with AWS IoT SiteWise, customers can more easily collect, organize, process, and monitor equipment data on-premises. This offering seamlessly integrates with their current infrastructure, providing advanced data analytics and enabling real-time industrial data operations and management at scale. This collaboration helps manufacturers streamline data handling, boost operational efficiency, reduce downtime, and enhance decision-making. The integration also eases deployment, providing a scalable, robust solution that drives significant value and innovation.

Bentley Systems Acquires 3D Geospatial Company Cesium

🔖 Topics: Acquisition
🏢 Organizations: Bentley Systems, Cesium

Bentley Systems, Incorporated (Nasdaq: BSY), the infrastructure engineering software company, announced it has acquired 3D geospatial company Cesium. Cesium is recognized as the foundational open platform for creating powerful 3D geospatial applications, and its 3D Tiles open standard has been widely adopted by leading enterprises, governments, and tens of thousands of application developers globally. Cesium ion, the company’s SaaS platform, brings 3D geospatial experiences to more than 1 million active devices every month, while Cesium’s open-source offerings have more than 10 million downloads.

Bentley’s iTwin Platform powers digital twin solutions that are used by engineering and construction firms and owner-operators to design, build, and operate the world’s infrastructure. The combination of Cesium plus iTwin enables developers to seamlessly align 3D geospatial data with engineering, subsurface, IoT, reality, and enterprise data to create digital twins with astonishing user experiences that scale from vast infrastructure networks to the millimeter-accurate details of individual assets—viewed from land, sky, and sea, from outer space to deep below the Earth’s surface.

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