Emerging Stronger After 100 Issues
We’ve made it to issue 100! Over the past two years, Exponential Industry has published every Sunday, rain or shine. We look forward to the next 100 issues along with many improvements to come. I cannot wait to share the details when they are ready, but until then I will reaffirm my commitment to each of you.
The Exponential Industry Commitment
Purpose
Exponential Industry seeks to provide the highest quality mixed media blog and newsletter for the business of high-tech manufacturing and supply chain. This blog seeks to build community across engineers, managers, and observers innovating within Industry 4.0 through weekly coverage of the latest in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), 3D printing, cyber-physical systems, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), robotics, and more!
Tenets
- Direct from the source - We bias to primary sources by aggregating thousands of company blogs, press releases, podcasts, deep dive articles, and videos directly from where they are originally published.
- Credit and attribution - We prominently display the author(s) and publication to give credit where credit is due.
- Straight to the point - Our excerpts seek to answer what and why. We want to highlight the value proposition and result so each reader is briefed on a wide range of topics and is encourgaed to dive deeper if the content is enticing to explore more.
- Private and opt-in by default - We use Substack to help us deliver this publication and as a result we know your email. On our website we use Cloudflare web analytics which does not compromise user privacy. That’s it. This gives us enough insight to know which media you find valuable in aggregate and ensure our content continues to hit the mark.
Assembly Line
Capturing this week's trending industry 4.0 and emerging industrial technology media
The Titanium Economy: Emerging stronger in the face of disruption
Companies in the Titanium Economy have taken steps to build agility in response to changing preferences and global supply chain challenges. They have innovated to meet their customers’ evolving needs by consolidating their value chains, maintaining regional sourcing and production, and minimizing the distance between engineering and manufacturing and their supply chains.
In the face of disruptive macroeconomic trends, the Titanium Economy has demonstrated resilience by adopting a playbook of calculated, through-cycle steps that companies across all sectors can learn from and implement. In our next article, we will explore the specific actions of this playbook and how they can help American industrials lay the foundation for the country’s future position on the world stage.
Manufacturing in America, post-globalisation
From Drafter to Innovator: The Evolution of the Design Engineer
The seeds of modern design were sown in 1765 by Gaspard Monge. The French mathematician is widely credited as the founder of descriptive geometry and technical drawing.
Simulation-led design (SLD) is advancing innovation by empowering designers with the ability to explore many more design options without adding time or cost. SLD not only reduces costs but optimizes product performance and advances innovation by allowing designers to digitally explore substantially more product design iterations by asking “what if?” and getting the answers quickly. Furthermore, as these designs have been more thoroughly validated against the requirements, failures in the field are reduced, which of course reduces product recalls and warranty costs.
Coolbrook heats metal to 1,700°C — while it also tackles global warming
Joonas Rauramo, chief executive of Coolbrook, believes his company has found a way to achieve temperatures of up to 1,700C for industrial processes through a novel form of electrification. “Our sweet spot is above 500C-600C,” he says.
In essence, Coolbrook’s technology reverses conventional turbine theory. For more than a century, coal and other fossil fuels have been burnt to create the heat and kinetic power used to turn turbine-driven generators and power electricity grids. But the start-up’s rotodynamic heaters and reactors turn that process on its head. They use electricity to rotate turbines, which, by forcing a rapid acceleration and deceleration of air or other gases, create violent levels of kinetic energy. This energy can supply the extreme temperatures required by many heavy industrial processes, which cannot normally be achieved by conventional electrification through resistive heaters, because these struggle to exceed a threshold of 500C.
What exactly renders a returnable glass bottle for milk sustainable?
The Berchtesgadener Land dairy has been awarded the Reusable Systems Innovation Prize of the German environmental association Deutsche Umwelthilfe (DUH) and the Stiftung Initiative Mehrweg (SIM; Foundation for Reusable Systems) for its new Krones glass line. A welcome opportunity for us to take a look at the factors influencing the sustainability of packaging.
The glass bottle is the most commonly used returnable packaging for milk and practically the only one that is taken back. Consumers regard it as a sustainable container of a superior nature that protects top-quality fresh milk. And it has recently been making a comeback: In 2019, sales of milk in returnable glass bottles in Germany were up by about 30 per cent over the preceding year. But the overall reuse quota for containers of milk-based beverages, at about 1.3 per cent, is very low. That was not always the case: In 2015, the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (ifeu) found that the proportion of returnable glass bottles for fresh milk had fallen by a good 90 per cent between 1995 and 2005. Demand for milk in returnable glass is now rising again. Berchtesgadener Land felt the full effect of this uptrend, which pushed the dairy’s old line to the limits of its capacity. With its new Krones filling line, the cooperative has doubled the output to 12,000 bottles per hour and is again able to respond in full to the demand of milk and cream fans.
How Chip Giant AMD Finally Caught Intel
Capital Expenditure
Tracking this week's major mergers, partnerships, and funding events in manufacturing and supply chain
FAIRMAT announces €34M Series A round to make it easier and more sustainable to recycle advanced materials through robotic technologies
Fairmat, the Paris-based sustainable deep tech start-up pioneering the recycling of advanced materials, announced today that it has completed its Series A funding round at a total of €34M, one of the largest Series A rounds for a deep tech startup in both France and Europe as a whole this year.
The company will use the funds to accelerate the deployment of its robotized industrial capabilities, including the ramp up of its newly inaugurated automated sorting plant, which will host over a hundred robots and be able to handle up to 3,500 metric tons of scrap per year. Additionally, the company will be expanding internationally into new markets, starting with the United States in 2023 and Spain, Germany, soon after. As part of this expansion, Fairmat will also grow its global team from 80 in 2022 to 400 people by 2025, seeking to recruit the best talent in robotics and data science.
RemotiveLabs secures funding for automotive software platform enabling iteration and speed
Startup RemotiveLabs is set to ensure that all software engineers, independent of industrial background, can solve challenges and collaborate in the cloud using best-practice approaches in software development. The Malmö-based AutoTech company has secured funding of 900k Euro and is now ready to scale internationally.
Investors include Volvo Cars Tech Fund, Almi Invest and private investor Anette Saleskog. The new funding will be used to continue to develop the platform and to grow awareness in the global marketplace. “The status quo tooling is not only expensive, but also hindering innovation and lowering productivity. We see a great response to what we’ve built so far and now we are set to grow a global community with a developer-first mindset to software in automotive” adds Per Sigurdson, Co-Founder and CEO.
ThroughPut Inc. Announces Partnership with project44 to Unleash AI-Powered Supply Chain Capacity and Profitability
ThroughPut Inc., the industrial AI supply chain pioneer, today announced that it has entered into a technology partnership with project44, the global leader in supply chain visibility, to unlock supply chain profitability amid disruptions and global port congestion.
The partnership will empower mutual customers to not only plan logistics fulfillment effectively and efficiently, but also to forecast demand accurately with AI-powered insights and recommendations for rapid supply chain revenue rationalization. The joint solution will enable businesses to quickly leverage project44 platform’s purchase order and sales data to sense and predict demand at a local level, audit material flow to drive efficiencies and achieve On-Time, In-Full (OTIF) deliveries at a supplier and product level.
Dutch semiconductor company Nexperia acquires Delft-based energy harvesting firm Nowi: Here’s why
Nijmegen, the Netherlands-based Nexperia, a company specialised in high-volume chip production, announced on Friday, November 11, that it has acquired Delft-based startup Nowi. However, the Dutch company did not disclose the financial details of the deal. With this acquisition, Nexperia aims to broaden its portfolio of power management products to include energy-harvesting solutions. Further, this deal is part of Nexperia’s shift into producing more integrated chipsets as well as its discrete power devices.
Founded in 2016, Nowi is a private semiconductor firm that has developed energy-harvesting power management IC (PMIC) that combines the smallest PCB (Printed Circuit Board) footprint with the lowest BOM (Bill of Material) cost and the best average harvesting performance. As a result, it simplifies the design process and lowers the threshold for any company to develop ‘Plug & Forget’ products.