Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: manufacturing

  • Inside Samsung’s exploding batteries

    Inside Samsung’s exploding batteries

    One of the most humiliating corporate crises of recent history has to be last year’s recall of the Galaxy Note.

    Airlines around the world started telling passengers that the devices were banned during their pre flight briefings, causing untold damage for the Samsung brand.

    Now Samsung have completed a review into what happened including an infographic illustrating the exact problem with the batteries.

    That review shows the design and manufacturing errors that resulted in the batteries bursting into flames. How Samsung are fixing it or putting in systems to prevent that happening again isn’t discussed.

    What the infographic does show is how complex the design, engineering and manufacturing is in modern technology – something that is often overlooked by many technologists.

    Battery technologies are particularly fraught as a lot of energy is compressed into a small space and the chemistry of Lithium Ion batteries makes them particularly dangerous should they be damaged or incorrectly used, as Boeing found with the early models of the 787 Dreamliner.

    Modern life and the devices that we take for granted are complex and that complexity though can easily come back to bite us. As Samsungs’ exploding batteries show, sometimes that complexity is difficult to manage.

     

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  • Autodesk and the China manufacturing challenge

    Autodesk and the China manufacturing challenge

    At the recend Autodesk University event in Sydney I had the opportunity to talk with Pat Williams, the company’s senior vice president for Asia Pacific.

    Williams’ beat covers all of Asia and he’s based out of Shanghai where he’s been based for the last eight years and prior to that he spent a decade in Japan.

    Having spent so much time in North East Asia, and heading to the PRC the following week myself, it was interesting to hear Williams’ views on how industry is changing in China and ther country’s attitude to American software companies.

    “There’s a lot of noise that gets made in China about their local IP and the local vendors and what I say is ‘the Chinese companies are competing in a global market and they are under the same competitive pressures as everybody else in the world so when they find a better tool they use it. Despite all the noise, business is quite good there.”

    For the Chinese economy, the aging and increasingly expensive workforce presents a problem, something addressed by the China Manufacturing 2025 plan which sees the country increasingly competing in high tech sectors such as aerospace, telecommunications and biotech fields.

    “China’s kind of an anomaly,” says Williams of the country’s immense growth rates. “From a government perspective there’s a lot of horsepower behind the things that they do – China 2025, their manufacturing initiative, you’ve got what they’ve been doing with Building Information Modelling (BIM) and our architectural tools.”

    They’ve really kind of spearheaded what we’ve been talking about on things like 3D printing of houses. China on its own is just this mushroom that’s happening.”

    While the industrial shift in China and the rest of Asia is promising opportunities to companies like Autodesk, that change is affecting their workforce as well with the company announcing plans to lay off ten percent of their workforce earlier this year.

    Those cutbacks are part of the adjustment to a new market reality says Williams, “it was part of right sizing the business.” He observed “we realised our margins were going to be compressed as we move to a subscription model.”

    Autodesk’s shifts illustrate how the opportunities in the new economy don’t come without costs even for the companies that seem to be winners in a shifting marketplace.

    In China, American companies are finding they have to a unique proposition – companies like Apple and Autodesk are good examples – and as the country moves its economy further up the value chain all foreign businesses are going to have to show how they add value.

    Succeeding in a changing economy isn’t without uncertainty. And it certainly isn’t without risks.

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  • Reverse financing a manufacturing revolution

    Reverse financing a manufacturing revolution

    Nano Dimensions may not have shipped a product since it was founded in 2012 but is worth $49 million dollars and was Israel’s best performing tech stock last year reports Bloomberg Business.

    It’s not surprising that Nano Dimensions has caught the imagination of investors, the company was founded in 2012 to develop advanced 3D printed electronics, including printers for multilayer PCBs (printed circuit boards) and the nanotechnology-based inks those machines rely upon.

    Should the technology prove successful, the application of those printers in fields like rapid prototyping is immense. The company speculates their devices may even get RFID tags down to the magical one cent figure which opens may opportunities in industries like logistics and retail.

    In a GeekMe profile of the company last June, the writer even speculated Nano Dimensions could be heralding a disruption to the electronics industry similar to that the music industry faced when home users could burn their own CDs and stream music.

    While that – and the speculation that 3D printing of electronic devices will kill Chinese manufacturing – may be some way off, it isn’t hard to see the potential of this technology.

    The Israeli aspect of the Nano Dimensions story is interesting as well, with the company receiving a $1.25 million investment from the country’s office of the chief scientist after it was reverse listed onto the local stock market by taking over a moribund company.

    For countries like Australia, Canada and the United States which are likely to have many moribund small mining and energy on their stock markets in coming years, such reverse listings may be an opportunity to spark their tech sectors with fresh capital and talent.

     

    While Nano Dimensions is still very a speculative venture, the company illustrates a number of possibilities for 3D printing, electronics, the Israeli tech industry and the future of fund raising at a time when the Silicon Valley venture capital model seems to be under stress.

    Another fascinating aspect of Nano Dimensions is that it’s one of the new breed of hardware startups, a field that until recently was dismissed as ‘too hard’ by most tech investors. Overall, the Israeli businesses an interesting company to watch for many of the aspects it touches upon.

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  • The limits of today’s technologies – day two of Autodesk University

    The limits of today’s technologies – day two of Autodesk University

    The second day of Autodesk University 2015 in Las Vegas continued the focus on innovation and changing industries, the afternoon innovation session was particularly focused on some of the opportunities being realised in drones, pre-fabricated buildings and lampshades made out of fungus.

    Brooklyn based designer Danielle Trofe gave a great demonstration of how she’s using fungus to create a range of sustainable light shades. Interestingly in a conversation earlier in the day with Autodesk CTO Jeff Kowalski the topic of growing products out of Mycelium, the vegetative part of a fungus that Trofe uses, was discussed in terms of smart packaging and biodegradable products.

    Growing products out of organic material is one of the themes explored in Mercedes Benz’s Biome concept car which proposes to grow the chassis out of seeds. While realising that concept is some way off, Trofe’s Mush-Lume idea shows some products are already at that stage.

    Rethinking prefab buildings

    Following Trofe was Jos Mulkens, the CEO of Dutch building company Voorbij Prefab, who described how by using sophisticated design tools and 3D printing to make prefabricated building panels they had reduced to the time to fabricate elements from days to hours.

    Mulkens gave a good insight into how design and production workflows are being accelerated with modern technology, particularly in replacing manual form makers to make the moulds for the precast panels. Voobij Prefab are flagging a lot of disruption heading for the building industry.

    At one the media breakout sessions a group of senior Autodesk managers discussed the trends in design and materials engineering. This turned out to be an interesting session on the limits of current technologies.

    Composite technologies

    Max Moruzzi, Autodesk’s Principal Research Scientist, is a passionate believer in composite materials and the benefits they promise. However he conceded when challenged by his colleague Steve Hobbs, who joined Autodesk last year with the acquisition of  UK based Computer Aided Manufacturing company Delcam, about the structural properties of composites that we still have a lot to understand about how they behave and fail.

    Bringing a touch of English scepticism to the panel, Hobbs pointed out almost all metallic components made by 3D printing require some sort of mechanical, subtractive finishing such as milling or polishing.

    Hobbs went onto warn that we risk introducing a “hairball of complexity” into the design and manufacturing industries as people experiment with developing products with materials and techniques they don’t fully understand.

    All the panel, which also included Carl White – Autodesk’s senior director of marketing for advanced manufacturing – and Benjamin Schrauwen who leads the company’s Spark 3D printing division, agreed that applying current design and manufacturing methods need to be rethought in the light of new methods being developed.

    The limits of 3D printing

    It was notable in the panel Q&A around the revelation that 70% of 3D printing projects fail, the panel put this down to the relative immaturity of software and machinery along with the technologies currently being poorly understood. Hobbs observed that for GE to 3D print their jet engine parts they rebuild and reprogram the printers they buy to their own higher specifications.

    For the final session CEO Carl Bass and CTO Jeff Kowalski faced a Q&A from analysts and the media, that session was interesting in exploring some of the directions Autodesk sees industry and business heading and I’ll write more about that tomorrow.

    Overall, the Autodesk University has been an interesting insight into the future of design and manufacturing along with the effects this has on other industries. With these technologies at an early stage, it’s a field that is going to evolve rapidly.

    Paul Wallbank travelled to Autodesk University in Las Vegas as a guest of Autodesk.

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  • The future of making things – Autodesk University Day One

    The future of making things – Autodesk University Day One

    “With technology I’m free,” says Hugh Herr of MIT Media Lab in the finishing segment of the Autodesk University 2015 opening keynote.

    Herr was describing how he overcame losing both his legs to frostbite at age 17 after being caught in a blizzard. Determined to continue his passion for climbing he started developing better prosthetics, studied mechanical engineering and became the leader of MIT Media Lab’s Biomechatronics Group.

    Prosthetic design is one of the aspects highlighted by Autodesk in their San Francisco Demonstration Gallery with good reason given the life transforming potential along with the imperatives of designing and manufacturing durable devices.

    Design and manufacturing are naturally the key things for Autodesk with CEO Carl Bass outlining some of the possibilities in the opening keynote for the Autodesk University conference in Las Vegas yesterday.

    Bass had some thoughts on the current buzzword of innovation, “it’s not one dramatic improvement of everything that came before, it’s most often combination of pragmatic improvements combining and refixing things in really new ways.”

    “It’s about doing the really hard work, the often unsexy work, of packaging it all up and making it successful.”

    The McGyver IoT

    Bass illustrated this view of innovation with a story of  troubleshooting his home lathe by duct taping his smartphone to the machine and using the microphone and gyroscope to detect when the cutting tip was becoming blunt.

    As Bass pointed out, his “McGyver concoction” of a phone and duct tape is a good example of a basic Internet of Things application where sensors, this time built into the smartphone, detect the state of a machine. It’s a small step from there to developing lathes that change their own cutting tools when required.

    Combining the IoT into design where a product’s design changes on feedback from its environment was a key part of the day’s discussions and touched upon Skylar Tibbit’s work on intelligent materials.

    Autodesk CTO Jeff Kowalski took the longer view of how the shift from passive to generative design methods will change the way we work stating boldly, “in the next twenty years we’ll see more change in the nature of work than we’ve seen in the last two thousand.”

    Rethinking manufacturing

    Kowlaski pointed out how the way of working where a craftsman has to point a tool at materials to form them is now being left behind as we start to see materials, and machines, that can manufacture themselves.

    For the present design and manufacture by humans remains the way we do things and in the media sessions one of the case studies was Airbus’ bionic partition where the company’s Bastian Schaefer and Autodesk’s David Benjamin described the process of redesigning a basic aircraft part.

    The results of a combination of 3D printing – in this case laser sintering of a metal alloy – and generative design resulted in a partition 45% lighter and eight percent thinner, savings not insubstantial when every kilo in an airliner costs its operator 106Kg of kerosene each year.

    An age of reduced consumption

    Reducing the resources being used was a key part of Andrew Mcafee’s keynote presentation where he describes a ‘dematerialising’ economy where a modern society is using less in the way of resources and energy while still improving living standards.

     

    Overall, the first day of the Autodesk University conference was an interesting exploration into how design and technology is changing lives both on the societal level and for individuals, as Hugh Herr’s story attests.

    Paul travelled to Las Vegas as a guest of Autodesk

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