Spearheading Resurgence in Interconnected Supply Chains
Shop Talk
Capturing this week's zeitgeist
Can you please tell me what Windows 10 and Windows 11 assets have not been seen on the network for longer than X hours?
Securing modern industrial automation environments remains challenging when an automatic update by security company Crowdstrike crashed 8.5 million Windows PCs around the world on Friday the 19th descending aviation, banking, and manufacturers into crisis. CrowdStrike has released a fix that requires manual intervention for each endpoint.
Kaizen Blitz
- 🚦 Andon Status
- 🟢 POSCO DX to focus on AI-led intelligent factory systems
- 🟢 LG Accelerates Smart Factory Solutions Business Integrating AI with 66-Year Manufacturing Expertise
- 🟢 First Solar commissions Western Hemisphere’s Largest Solar R&D Center
- đź“Š Survey Says
- Augury’s State of Production Health 2024 with 96% of leaders feeling optimistic about manufacturing’s future.
- Zebra Technologies’ AI Machine Vision in the Automotive Industry Benchmark Report
- NAM’s How Manufacturers Are Using Artificial Intelligence
- 🗣️ Town Hall
- Agility Robotics CEO Peggy Johnson hints at “fully loaded $30 per hour” for its Digit humanoid.
- Michael Larsson, President of Dematic, discusses robotics, how AI affects automation design, and the rise of flexible fulfillment.
- Ambarella CTO Les Kohn on LLM readiness for Robotics and Self-Driving.
- CEO Peter Schmitt on Fluent Metal’s single-step liquid metal 3D printing technology
- 🏛️📜 Industrial Policy
- $2 Billion to Support American Auto Workers through retooling 11 Existing Motor Vehicle Manufacturing Facilities for Electric Vehicles.
- GlobalWafers to Significantly Increase Production of Silicon Wafers in U.S. with $400 million in proposed direct funding under the CHIPS and Science Act.
Assembly Line
This week's most influential Industry 4.0 media.
Inside The Lockheed Martin Plant That’s Spearheading Resurgent F-16 Sales
The plant at Donaldson Airport, Greenville, is now the center of Lockheed Martin’s F-16 production effort. Here, the company is building brand new Block 70/72 variants of the fighter that’s known unofficially as the Viper for new and returning F-16 customers, including Bahrain, Bulgaria, Jordan, Slovakia, and Taiwan.
The first F-16 to enter production at Greenville was a two-seat F-16 Block 70, D-model for Bahrain. It took three and a half years to build from that first hole being drilled to its first flight on January 24, 2023. That manufacturing process has now been whittled down to 11-12 months, according to Hendrick. “We are making modifications to our facilities here and building new infrastructure that will make sure we can ramp up,” Hendrick explains. “We have a new Material Flow Center that’s designed to maximize getting the parts, tools, everything that we need here, faster.”
Manufacturing the new Block 70/72 F-16 still relies heavily on aluminium, with very few composite structures. Greenville has already introduced 15 new production techniques for the F-16, including one that’s taken directly from the F-35 program. A new automatic robot is now used to drill, ream, and countersync some 2,800 holes in the center fuselage to prepare it for application of the outer skin surface. It makes for a process that’s faster, more accurate and cheaper. The program is also now using augmented reality in the process of the installation of wiring harnesses, to help engineers route cabling inside the aircraft’s structure.
Honeywell Aerospace Leverages Ansys for Future-Ready Aviation Solutions
Improving productivity in low-volume, high-complexity manufacturing
LV/HC products are often very large—think of passenger airplanes, paper machines, forklifts, or construction cranes—and they are usually critical to a customer’s mission. Their prices are high, reflecting the cost of their components, the stringent quality requirements, the intricacies of customized production, and the need for sizable manufacturing facilities and specialized equipment. Labor costs may also be significant, because fewer tasks can be automated.
Our analysis suggests that the most successful OEMs simultaneously focus on six critical areas: sales and operations planning, supply chain, inventory management, shop floor operations, talent, and change management. Other companies along the value chain, including raw material providers and suppliers, could also benefit from a similar focus. Experience shows that businesses that excel in all six areas have boosted production volume by about 10 percent and improved rework efficiency by about 40 percent.
Fully automated, physics-based analysis of SCADA temperature signals for Drivetrain Monitoring
The SkySpecs Performance team has demonstrated that physics-based models can be used to model the thermal response of components inside the wind turbine with full transparency, low complexity, and high accuracy. By using this approach, a number of faults can be detected across a wind turbine portfolio, including gearbox, main bearing, and generator damage.
The rate of change of body temperature is then calculated using a thermal inertia coefficient, calculated for each individual turbine. All coefficients are trained using reference datasets from relatively short time periods, and used to predict future temperature responses of the same components. Prediction and measurement are finally compared to produce residual values, which in turn were used to detect the presence of component faults.
Building a generative AI reservoir simulation assistant with Stone Ridge Technology
In the field of reservoir simulation, accurate modeling is paramount for understanding and predicting the behavior of subsurface flow through geological formations. However, the complexities involved in creating, implementing, and optimizing these models often pose significant challenges, even for experienced professionals. Fortunately, the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) offers a transformative solution to streamline and enhance the reservoir simulation workflow. This post describes our efforts in developing an intelligent simulation assistant powered by Amazon Bedrock, Anthropic’s Claude, and Amazon Titan LLMs, aiming to revolutionize the way reservoir engineers approach simulation tasks.
Although not covered in this architecture, two key elements enhance this workflow significantly and are the topic of future exploration: 1) simulation execution using natural language by orchestration through a generative AI agent, and 2) multimodal generative AI (vision and text) analysis and interpretation of reservoir simulation results such as well production logs and 3D depth slices for pressure and saturation evolution. As future work, automating aspects of our current architecture is being explored using an agentic workflow framework as described in this AWS HPC post.
Using Predictive and Gen AI to Improve Product Categorization at Walmart
To optimally use the limited display space and enable customers to discover the most pertinent and appealing products within each department, we developed Ghotok, a cutting-edge AI technique which can effectively analyze and understand the relationships between different products and categories. The ultimate goal of this project is to save customers’ time by making their online shopping experience more efficient and fun.
Ghotok’s objective is to consider domain-specific contextual information to understand the many-to-many relationships between two different types of product hierarchies (that is, Category and Product Type) pairs. To achieve this, Ghotok incorporates advances in both Predictive and Generative AI techniques to find the most relevant product types for each category. Instead of choosing one single model for both Predictive and Generative AI, we use an ensemble of models. Ensemble models are a machine learning approach that combines multiple ML models to make predictions. The goal of ensemble learning is to combine the outputs of diverse ML models to create a more precise prediction. One benefit of this approach is that it dispenses with the requirement for customer engagement data (which is noisy as sometimes customers might click on items by mistake or out of curiosity) by leveraging a limited amount of human-labeled data. This makes the model effective for both frequently and rarely visited parts of our product hierarchies.
Precision Home Robotics w/Real-to-Sim-to-Real
Remanufacturing Initiation for Original Equipment Manufacturers
Remanufacturing is an industrial process in which a core – a used, discarded, or broken product – is transformed into a product with a like-new specification and condition. However, to this date, remanufacturing activities on the market are few compared to manufacturing. There are several types of remanufacturers; the least common type is the original equipment remanufacturer, an original equipment manufacturer that not only manufactures new products but also remanufactures cores of its own products. Remanufacturing is potentially becoming a more widely used industrial process for original equipment manufacturers, and increased remanufacturing activities can positively contribute to the environment. The contribution comes from a reduction of raw material and energy consumption compared to manufacturing. Therefore, remanufacturing has the potential to decouple environmental impact from economic growth, thus contributing to more sustainable societies. However, assessing the benefits of remanufacturing does not directly correlate to growth within the remanufacturing industry. To encapsulate the environmental, social, and economic benefits of remanufacturing, manufacturers need to be aware of how remanufacturing can be initiated and implemented in practice. Therefore, the objective of this dissertation is to develop support measures for original equipment manufacturers to initiate profitable remanufacturing.
This research takes a stand in case study and transdisciplinary research where the initiation of profitable remanufacturing is studied at two original equipment manufacturers. The research study developed knowledge of how remanufacturing could be incorporated into existing operations at original equipment manufacturers. In parallel, financial assessments based on cost-benefit analysis were built to measure how well the case companies could perform remanufacturing. For the case study research, seven remanufacturing scenarios were developed, ranging from centralised remanufacturing performed by the original equipment manufacturer to decentralised performed at multiple locations using a retail network. Which scenario is preferable depends on, for example, risk-consciousness, cooperation between actors, and volume targets. However, given ideal circumstances, remanufacturing in-house in a centralised scenario was shown to be the most beneficial for the investigated original equipment manufacturer since the fewer middle hands and economies of scale also potentially enable lower costs.
New Product Introduction
Highlighting new and innovative facilities, processes, products, and services
Industry’s First Technology to Use Magnesium Alloys in Wire-Laser Metal 3D Printer Developed by Multi-sector Consortium in Japan
Magnesium Research Center (MRC) of Kumamoto University, TOHO KINZOKU CO., LTD., and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced the 3D printing industry’s first high-precision additive manufacturing (AM) technology for using magnesium alloys in a wire-laser metal 3D printer via the directed energy deposition (DED) method, marking a significant leap forward in industrial manufacturing. Unlocking the potential to process magnesium alloys with unparalleled precision and complexity will pave the way for rocket, automobile, aircraft, etc. components that are lighter and stronger than those made of iron or aluminum, leading to improved fuel efficiency and, in the case of rockets, reduced production costs. In addition, the envisioned production processes based on a wire-laser metal 3D printer will be more energy efficient and generate fewer greenhouse gas emissions compared to conventional processes, promising to deliver low-impact solutions for increased sustainability.
The consortium combined Mitsubishi Electric’s metal 3D printer, which uses the wire-laser DED method and metal wire instead of metal powder as a material, with a highly nonflammable KUMADAI heat-resistant magnesium alloy developed by MRC. In tests, Mitsubishi Electric repeated the molding process with the KUMADAI heat-resistant magnesium alloy produced by TOHO KINZOKU using advanced wire drawing technology. The result is a new technology that uses a magnesium-alloy wire as an AM material and precise temperature control to prevent combustion.
New AI-powered dynamic slotting simplifies warehouse reslotting with click of a button
Distribution center technology provider, Lucas Systems, announced its next generation of Dynamic Slotting, a warehouse game changer for providing in-the-moment reslotting decisions, thanks to the powerful use of AI. Lucas Systems’ software will intelligently sift through an abundance of warehouse data to serve up optimal slotting recommendations. The results take minutes to generate, whereas traditional slotting analysis often takes months to complete using engineering resources or consultants.
Dynamic Slotting’s recommendations identify product moves that offer the biggest potential payback. Hundreds of parameters are taken into account including demand seasonality, item size, SKU velocity and costs. Its similarity detection prevents placing related items side by side to reduce picking errors. Lucas Systems’ Dynamic Slotting promises 20-40% increase in throughput because it recommends best locations for inventory based on SKU velocity, SKU affinity, product/slot information, pick paths and other data.
The Tesla of Stoves Comes With a Battery to Power Your Whole House
Impulse’s system can be integrated directly into a home’s wiring in a way that allows it to push electricity back into the home—and onto the grid. This means the cooktop could charge when electricity is cheap, and then a third party could sell that stored power back to the utility company when electricity is expensive, at times of peak demand, as part of what’s known as a virtual power plant. Copper CEO Sam Calisch says his company is more focused on getting as many of its oven and cooktop combos into as many homes as quickly as possible, in order to reduce global carbon emissions.
In the future, Impulse would like to sell consumers an array of battery-powered appliances, including hot-water heaters, that would create a whole network of batteries in their homes. For now, that idea is an aspiration. Impulse has yet to sell any of its cooktops, while Copper has installed a few dozen of its oven and cooktop combos in homes, and this week opened orders for them to the general public.
Anker, long known for producing battery packs for recharging phones, has scaled up battery packs to an almost absurd degree—big enough to power your whole home. The Anker Solix X1 starts at five kilowatt-hours and is less than a 10th the size of the battery in a small electric vehicle like the base model Chevrolet Bolt or Tesla Model 3. But by adding wall-mounted packs, homeowners could scale up their systems until they are bigger than all but the biggest battery packs in EVs, and have enough juice to keep even a McMansion with a pool heater running for days.
Business Transactions
This week's top funding events, acquisitions, and partnerships across industrial value chains.
Nearfield Instruments secures €135 million in landmark deep-tech funding round
Nearfield Instruments, the developer of state-of-the art Metrology & Inspection (M&I) solutions for the semiconductor manufacturing industry, announced the successful closure of a €135 million Series-C funding round. The oversubscribed funding round is led by two new major investors, Walden Catalyst, an industry leading US venture capital firm helping the next generation of category-defining businesses in deep-tech, and Temasek, a global investor that also looks into opportunities in emerging technologies to solve complex and high impact challenges, and address market inflections. M&G Investments, a leading global asset manager, through its Catalyst strategy, is acting as a co-investor. The success of this round is further underscored by the participation of existing investors Innovation Industries, Invest-NL, and ING.
The growing complexities in advanced semiconductor manufacturing, driven by the surge in demand for higher performing and lower energy consuming chips, are addressed by Nearfield’s innovative process control solutions. These include the QUADRA 3D metrology system that provides non-destructive, high-throughput, and high-resolution metrology capabilities. Nearfield is deeply engaged with most major chip manufacturers globally, and QUADRA is fully validated and deployed in high-volume manufacturing.
Halo Industries Closes $80 Million Series B Funding Round Led by Thomas Tull’s U.S. Innovative Technology Fund
Halo Industries, Inc., the creator of a laser manufacturing technology platform for the semiconductor industry, announced it raised up to $80 million in its oversubscribed Series B funding round. Led by Thomas Tull’s U.S. Innovative Technology Fund (USIT) with participation from 8VC and SAIC, the funding will help Halo Industries scale the commercialization and reach of its technology and advance its mission to establish the new gold-standard of silicon carbide substrate production.
Halo Industries’ proprietary laser-based tools and processing technologies enable efficient, precise and high-quality manufacturing that minimizes the cost, waste and environmental impact associated with traditional manufacturing methods. The company manufactures several materials used for semiconductor production, including silicon carbide (SiC) wafers, which serve as the building block of efficient high voltage power electronics. Leveraging SiC wafers for power devices enables greater power output and system performance while being smaller, lighter, and more robust than traditional materials. SiC is a hard, brittle material that is challenging to cut without losing meaningful amounts, and Halo Industries’ proprietary laser-based slicing tools significantly increase yield and quality of SiC while minimizing waste and production cost.
Standard Bots Secures $63M in Funding to Propel American Manufacturing Forward with AI-Driven Robotics
Standard Bots, a pioneer in robotics automation, announced it has raised $63 million in total funding, with its recent Series B round led by General Catalyst with participation from Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund and Samsung Next. The company has already successfully launched its RO1 robotic arm and is now preparing to bring its new AI-powered robots to market, unlocking use cases and industries untouched by traditional robotics, such as complex assembly, food preparation, or dishwashing.
Standard Bots designs and assembles collaborative robotic arms in the United States to transform industrial sectors such as manufacturing. The company is also developing a transformer-based model that leverages the power of AI to enhance robotic capabilities. By observing human demonstrations, Standard Bots empowers robots to master intricate tasks from loading complex welding fixtures to folding clothing with unprecedented precision, marking a pivotal moment in the industry and unlocking a realm of new possibilities previously deemed by many to be beyond robotic reach. Standard Bots’ RO1 and RO2 robotic arms are currently in production and are designed for high variability and challenging real-world applications, a stark contrast to traditional, pre-programmed robots that often cannot navigate unpredictable conditions such as dynamic or cluttered environments and unexpected obstacles.
Didero is using AI to solve supply chain management at mid-market companies
Didero announced a $7 million seed investment. While it was at it, the startup also announced it was emerging from stealth and making its product generally available. The round was led by First Round Capital with participation from Construct Capital, AI Grant, Box Group, Company Ventures and Conviction. Industry angels also contributed.
The company uses a variety of AI models, including OpenAI and Google Gemini, depending on the task or requirement, and they are continually experimenting to see which model is best suited to what they are trying to accomplish. “We’re using a lot of foundational models and APIs that are out there. We’re not creating our own foundational models, but we’re doing a lot of fine-tuning of some of the existing models,” company CEO Tom Petit said.
PowerCo and QuantumScape Announce Landmark Agreement to Industrialize Solid-State Batteries
Volkswagen Group’s battery company PowerCo and QuantumScape (NYSE: QS) announced they have entered into a groundbreaking agreement to industrialize QuantumScape’s next-generation solid-state lithium-metal battery technology. Upon satisfactory technical progress and certain royalty payments, QuantumScape will grant PowerCo the license to mass produce battery cells based on QuantumScape’s technology platform.
Under the non-exclusive license, PowerCo can manufacture up to 40 gigawatt-hours (GWh) per year using QuantumScape’s technology with the option to expand up to 80 GWh annually, enough to outfit approximately one million vehicles per year. The companies believe this high-touch engagement represents the fastest way to achieve gigawatt-hour-scale production of solid-state technology to meet the growing global demand for better electric vehicle batteries. The agreement supersedes an earlier joint venture between the Volkswagen Group and QuantumScape to co-manufacture batteries.
The agreement creates a highly collaborative partnership that amplifies the companies’ core competencies – QuantumScape’s cutting-edge technology and PowerCo’s global capabilities in industrialization and manufacturing facilities. It will feature a combined workforce initiative to accelerate the industrialization of QuantumScape’s technology. A large, dedicated scale-up team, composed of experts from both companies, will execute on the industrialization activities.
TRUMPF and SiMa.ai agree on strategic partnership for lasers with artificial intelligence
TRUMPF and SiMa.ai, the software-centric, embedded edge machine learning system-on-chip company, signed a partnership to develop lasers with artificial intelligence (AI). The goal is to equip several laser systems of TRUMPF with AI technology in the near future. This includes systems for welding, cutting and marking, as well as powder metal 3D printers. Both companies bring their respective expertise to the collaboration: TRUMPF, its laser application expertise, and SiMa.ai, its machine learning system on chip (MLSoC) technology.
The joint collaboration intends to accelerate complex material processing. The powerful, compact and energy-efficient AI chips will be integrated directly into the laser systems. The AI-optimized sensor technology can monitor the quality of the laser welding process in real time and evaluate more than 3,000 images per second. In electric car production, for example, the real-time quality inspection during laser welding with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to replace separate and complex testing procedures. Moreover, battery manufacturers will be able to increase the quality of their production in real time and reduce the reject rate which could ultimately lower the price of electric cars for consumers.
Cleveland-Cliffs to Acquire Stelco for C$70 per Share
Stelco Holdings Inc. (TSX: STLC) is pleased to announce that it has entered into a definitive agreement with Cleveland-Cliffs Inc. (NYSE: CLF), pursuant to which Cliffs has agreed to acquire all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Stelco at a price of C$70.00 per share, consisting of C$60.00 in cash and 0.454 of a share of Cliffs common stock (equivalent to C$10.00 based on the closing price of Cliffs common stock on July 12, 2024) per Stelco share.
The total enterprise value pursuant to the Transaction is approximately C$3.4 billion. The Consideration represents an 87% premium to Stelco’s closing share price of C$37.36 on July 12, 2024, and a 37% premium to Stelco’s 52-week high.