This Week in Engineering

LG Energy is General Motors partner of choice for the firm's broad new Ultium battery program, but the company has just announced a new joint venture with Stellantis to produce EV batteries at a yet undisclosed American location. The project is substantial in size and will supply multiple Stellantis brands. LG has a relationship with Stellantis going back to 2014 when the firm supplied batteries and control systems for the Chrysler Pacifica hybrid.

Former Boeing engineering test pilot Mark Forkner has been indicted in a Fort Worth, Texas Federal Court on multiple charges stemming from his involvement in the development of the MCAS system used in Boeing 737 Max airplanes. Prosecutors allege that Forkner deliberately concealed details of the MCAS system from FAA regulators, resulting in the exclusion of it from Boeing pilot operating manuals. Allegations claim that this omission was an important contributory factor to the crashes of two Max airplanes with the loss of all aboard. This is the first indictment of an individual in the Boeing MCAS saga.

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With much of the world’s auto industry now crippled by a serious shortage of integrated circuits, the search for a solution to the dual problems of Covid related supply chain breakdown and limited global foundry capacity is on, in earnest. The stakes are high, with some analysts estimating that production of popular models could be cut by 1/3, with billions of dollars in lost revenue. Samsung, already a major foundry and contract manufacturer for fabless IC firms, has chosen central Texas for a very large facility that will likely produce single digit nanometre scale devices. While this will stabilize supply in the future, best estimates of facility start up are about two years, typical for large, complex foundry operations. Auto shortages may persist.

While integrated circuits are an immediate problem for the auto industry, finding ways to make electric vehicles affordable and profitable is a larger, longer-term issue. General Motors has announced a new technical center in Warren, Michigan for cell and battery development that will include manufacturing techniques for use in GM plants and at GM/LG joint-venture operations in Tennessee and Ohio. Targets are aggressive, a 60% reduction in battery cost compared to GM’s current generation Ultium devices. The research center will encompass all aspects of cell and battery production, from basic chemistry to fabrication and durability testing.

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With the race to replace internal combustion engines with electric vehicles heating up, the question of where this new production will come from is the pressing issue for the industry. Will it be new facilities or the conversion of existing plants? Ford appears to be doing both, with a major conversion of the existing facilities and the announcement of two very large new operations, an assembly plant in Tennessee and a joint venture with SK Innovation for battery production in Kentucky.

Sustained hypersonic flight has been a hot topic of research in aerospace for decades, and hot on the heels of recent Chinese advancements in scramjet technology, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman have announced the successful test of an air breathing hypersonic missile built for the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency. While current scramjet technology is suitable only for short duration use in weapons, similar technologies are under development that could be scaled to allow true single-stage to orbit performance with hybrid engines.

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While large-scale farming of crops such as grains and pulses lend themselves readily to automation, a major portion of the global agriculture industry is based on orchard and nursery crops. These industries are still highly labour-intensive, but small Philadelphia-based startup called Burro has developed an autonomously guided vehicle that’s designed to assist human pickers in fruit, vegetable and nursery operations. The devices shuffle the crops of the fields or orchards, freeing humans to pick, and pack.

There are many luxury electric vehicle offerings on the market today, and a new, high-performance rival has just entered production. Lucid Motors has rolled the first vehicle off the firm’s Casa Grande, Arizona assembly line, with customer deliveries expected to begin in late October. The $77,000 Lucid Air carries an EPA estimated range of over 500 miles and can be charged to 300 miles of range in 20 minutes. The company is already expanding production facilities to produce a new SUV product in 2023.

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Electric vehicles are the highest topic in mobility today, with the primary focus on automakers like Tesla as well as legacy manufacturers. But for much of the world today, two wheeled mobility, specifically scooters and small motorcycles are the vehicles of choice, especially in urban areas. The segment is ripe for electrification, and Indian company Ola has announced a world first: a massive, 10,000 employee mass production facility employing entirely women. The facility is expected to produce 15% of all the world's electric scooters and is expected to start production next year.

In a different form of transportation news, Boeing has announced a new production facility at MidAmerica St. Louis Airport in Illinois, where the Navy's new drone tanker, the MQ-25 Stingray will be assembled. The heavily automated factory is expected to employ 300 at peak production building an initial U.S. Navy order of 70 airframes. Both new factory announcements note advanced systems engineering, Industry 4.0 and automation as keys to production.

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A research team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has achieved a breakthrough in electromagnetics, producing the most powerful magnet in the world. Working with MIT spinoff Commonwealth Fusion Systems, the high temperature superconducting magnet can generate a sustained magnetic field of more than 20 T, which the team believes is enough to allow Commonwealth’s compact tokamak to achieve net energy from fusion. If successful it will be a historic first for fusion energy.

Industry advocacy group the Manufacturer’s Alliance has released a survey of US manufacturers about their challenges during Covid-19 and beyond. With strained supply chains and rising costs, flexibility is the watchword, and workers agree. Novel labor arrangements and new ways to organize production processes will be needed for manufacturers to staff their operations optimally in a labor short US market.

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A French research team has proposed a radical innovation in artificial intelligence: electromechanical artificial neurons. The team has developed technology that mimics the function of mammalian neurons closely, using graphene to trap water molecules in a similar way to the internal flow of ions within nerve cells. Simulations suggest that the water molecules will assemble themselves under the influence of electric fields in ways that show a memristor effect, very promising for both storage and information processing applications.

In a different yet similarly significant AI development, the US Patent and Trademark Office has rejected an inventor’s application that a neural network be named as inventor on a patent application. That rejection was upheld by a federal court, but the appeals process is ongoing. The situation in Australia is exactly the opposite, with lower courts ruling that AI can be named inventor, with that nation’s patent authorities appealing that decision. The outcomes may have a profound effect on how we define invention and innovation in the 21st century.

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IBM has launched a novel processor that is optimized for a special application: finance. The new Telum processor is built for AI integration, which with the right software, can perform real-time analyses of financial transactions and stop fraud as it happens. IBM predicts that the technology will similarly be useful for real-time credit approval for online banking and transaction settlement with very little latency. The processor is built around eight 5 GHz cores and contains an incredible 22 billion transistors.

A global team of university and industry researchers have discovered the root cause of a serious problem in the development of quantum computers: correlation. Detecting and correcting errors is a major roadblock in quantum computer development, and the team’s discovery that single errors can affect a large number of qubits simultaneously is a significant step forward in developing practical quantum computers. Just as significant is the discovery that a major source of these errors are cosmic rays, highly energetic and difficult to screen. Future quantum computers may require heavy radiation shielding for optimum performance.

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Advanced robot maker Boston Dynamics is famous for four and two-legged robots that mimic the movement of dogs and people respectively. The bipedal humanoid robot, Atlas is a YouTube sensation with the capability of very sophisticated motion that mimics advanced human movements such as dancing. In its latest development, the company puts Atlas through a parkour course, demonstrating how the sensor suite and algorithms adapt to the local environment.

Elon Musk’s much-anticipated AI day was held August 19, and two key announcements were noteworthy. One is the development of a scalable and modular processor array for the company’s Dojo supercomputer program, but the other is perhaps more significant: a humanlike robot program. Musk announced that the firm is hiring talent for the robotics program immediately, and expects to produce a human -sized, bipedal and useful machine the prototype ready in 2022. It’s a very ambitious timeline and much depends on the success of Dojo.

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Two significant developments in fusion technology were announced this week. At the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in the US, the National Ignition Facility announced that their laser compression device achieved greater than 1 MJ fusion energy output, six times higher than the team’s previous best and a strong indicator that the technology can be scaled to make practical levels of power. A much older fusion technology, the stellarator, is enjoying a new lease on life with recently published experiments from the Max Planck Institute in Germany which show dramatically higher efficiencies, consistent with conventional tokamak devices.

Nuclear propulsion for commercial cargo ships has been expected since the birth of naval nuclear propulsion in the mid-1950s, but with the exception of the experimental NS Savannah, no cargo ship has been powered by atomic energy. With the increased urgency of CO2 reduction however, the technology is under assessment again and shows promise both for environmental reasons and because of higher oil prices. Earth 300 Ventures, a Singapore-based environmental group, plans to launch a large research vessel in 2025 which is designed to accept an advanced reactor, possibly a molten salt design, some 5 to 10 years later. In the meantime, the UK is revamping Maritime regulations to be ready for commercial atomic vessel traffic.

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