Let It Rain or Else No Chips
Computer motherboard. Credit: Alexandre Debiève
Industry continues to face massive shortages of computer chips and the primary producer, Taiwan, faces many unique risks compounding the shortage. One set of risks is geographical. Taiwan is an island with a subtropical climate that often incurs supply shocks for electricity and water. Without vast energy resources nor space for renewable sources, Taiwan produces roughly two-thirds of its electricity from imported coal and natural gas. During the summer months, when demand for air conditioning peaks and grid load is the highest, rolling brown outs occur that affect semiconductor fabrication facilities (examples from 1999 and 2017). More recently water has come into focus but that has also been a persistent problem for Taiwan. Oh and they also have earthquakes too. The last elephant in the room, is the geopolitical risk to the semiconductor supply chain that is getting a lot of attention in Washington. There are not a lot of options for cutting edge semiconductor technology if these risks are borne out. For now, let it rain in Taiwan.
Visual Inspection
4 ways to maximize your machine tending investment
Additionally, follow along a robot at a Korean electronics manufacturer and visualize real-time telemetry data from Formula 1 cars.
Acoustic Monitoring
Assembly Line
Strategic Analytics Help Intertape Polymer Shrink Inefficiencies
For Intertape Polymer Group (IPG), a global manufacturer of packaging and protective solutions for industrial and e-commerce applications, the digital transformation process has always been about embracing technology with a keen eye on extracting the overall business value. As such, IPG is currently at different levels of maturity across the portfolio of digital technology deployments, including additive manufacturing, AR/VR training, IoT-based predictive downtime and robotic process automation.
IPG has taken advantage of the unique data modeling capabilities of the Sight Machine platform, which continuously transforms all data types generated by factory equipment and manufacturing software into a robust data foundation for analyzing and modeling a plant’s machines, production processes and finished products.
Smart Factory in Actual Practice – Toward Autonomous Production
In Sick’s sensor factory in Freiburg-Hochdorf, driverless transport systems curve around automated production modules and workstations operated by people or collaborating human-robot teams. “The modules are cells in which the robot performs a defined task in a fixed working environment, such as the final assembly of various sensor components,” Joachim Schultis explained, Head of Operations for Photoelectric Sensors & Fibers at Sick AG “The modules are completely setup-free; format and material changes are carried out by the control system operating in the background.”
Creating a Factory of the Future in Aerospace
One of the unique anomalies of aerospace manufacturing is how it transitions from automated to manual production. Many initial components are fabricated in highly automated machining or manufacturing systems. These systems are already Industry 4.0-enabled with integrated sensors and PLCs that capture and package production data for analysis and quality control.
As subassemblies are created and installed, final assembly and integration is much more manual. For example, the final tightening of thousands of fasteners on aircraft is often done with pneumatic and manual wrenches that are purely mechanical, with manual inspections and written verification on paper documents. However, aerospace manufacturers can improve this process by integrating smart, programmable tightening tools that document the amount of torque applied for each fastener and that can automatically reconfigure torque and rotation settings based on the assigned task.
Mercury Marine builds innovative acoustic testing facility
When an industry leader in the marine segment decided it needed a worthy noise, vibration and harshness (NVH) test facility — one that exceeded product development goals across a broad range of products — engineers at Mercury Marine quickly learned that designing a state-of-the-art facility to satisfy rigid acoustic noise and vibration criteria and facilitate collaboration among product development and engineering staff would not be easy.
Surge Demand
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