In line with ExOne’s standing for sand and metal 3D printing, the company’s newly launched S-Max Pro sand printer integrates with Siemens’ Digital Enterprise Portfolio of software.
 
“With this expanded partnership, ExOne will deliver even more value to our foundry and manufacturing customers who rely on our industrial 3D printers,” said ExOne CEO John Hartner. “We are pleased to be the first industrial 3D printer to fully integrate the latest of Siemens control, sensing and motion technologies and this new MindSphere technology, which will give our customers a new level of control and plant integration.”
 
Exone’s printer is able to print at speeds of 135 layers per hour, using binder jetting technology. Its partnership with Siemens is said to benefit industrial customers in areas such as the automotive and aerospace industries, bringing industry 4.0 to industrial printing.
 
Dr. Karsten Heuser, Vice President of Additive Manufacturing at Siemens Digital Industries, said, “ We are excited to further strengthen our partnership with ExOne and improve the industrialization of additive manufacturing. Siemens brings new digital technologies and its serious industrial domain knowhow to help ExOne generate further value. The new ExOne S-Max Pro™ 3D printer shows that seamlessly integrated software and automation solutions conclude in shorter time to market, higher performance and maximum availability.”



This article is originally posted on Tronserve.com

Since mid-90', CRP Technology has been altering the rules of additive processing, smashing records and setting models nowadays that apply to the 3D printing technology with polyamide materials.
 
A clear sign of this continued performance is Windform® FR1 (FR stands for Flame Retardant), the new-born material from the Windform® TOP-LINE family of composite materials for Additive Manufacturing.
It is planned to become a game-changing material in the field of 3D printing for its uniqueness: it is the first Flame Retardant (UL 94 V-0 rated) material for Additive Manufacturing which is carbon fiber reinforced.
It is also transferred successfully the FAR 25.853 12-second vertical and 15-second horizontal flammability tests as well as the 45° Bunsen burner test.
 
'Only a few days from the launch of a new range of Windform® materials, the P-LINE for HSS technology - commented Franco Cevolini, VP and CTO at CRP Technology - I'm very proud to launch a new revolutionary composite material from the Windform® TOP-LINE family of materials for Laser Sintering technology. Our aim is to regularly produce technological breakthroughs. With Windform® FR1 we can steer you toward the proper solution for your projects'
 
Windform® FR1 is halogen free polyamide-based material, that combines superior mechanical properties with excellent stiffness and lightweight.
 
Owing to its flame-retardant quality, this high-performance polyamide based composite material is appropriate for Aircrafts and Aerospace applications (interior parts, cockpit, cabin components, air conditioning piping, air ducts, air outlet valves); Automotive and Transportation parts (vehicle interiors, housing and enclosure assemblies); Consumer goods and Electronics (lighting, appliances) and in general for any parts necessitating flame retardant rating.
Windform® FR1 is also ideal for high feature detail applications requiring FAR 25.853 fire retardant compliancy.
Windform® FR1 is also best for the manufacturing of components with detailed surface resolution.
 
'We will not stop here- added Franco Cevolini - we will continue our work on renewal and technological expansion in the field of Additive Manufacturing. Stay tuned!'



This article is originally posted on Tronserve.com

There's no doubt that GPU-powerhouse Nvidia would like to have a solution for all size scales of AI—from massive data center jobs down to the always-on, low-power neural networks that listen for wakeup words in voice assistants.
 
Right now, that would take several different technologies, because none of them scale up or down particularly well. It’s clearly preferable to be able to deploy one technology rather than some. So, according to Nvidia chief expert Bill Dally, the company has been seeking to answer the question: “Can you build something scalable... while still maintaining competitive performance-per-watt across the entire spectrum?”
 
It looks like the answer is yes. Last month at the VLSI Symposia in Kyoto, Nvidia detailed a tiny test chip that can work on its own to do the low-end jobs or be linked tightly together with up to 36 of its kin in a single module to do deep learning’s heavy lifting. And it does it all while achieving roughly the same top-class performance.
 
The individual accelerator chip is fashioned to execute the execution side of deep learning rather than the training part. Engineers typically measure the efficiency of such “inferencing” chips in terms of how many operations they can do per joule of energy or millimeter of area. A single one of Nvidia’s prototype chips peaks at 4.01 tera-operations per second (1000 billion operations per second) and 1.29 TOPS per millimeter. Compared to prior prototypes from other groups using the same precision the single chip was at least 16 times as area efficient and 1.7 times as energy efficient. But linked together into a 36-chip system it reached 127.8 TOPS. That’s a 32-fold performance boost. (Admittedly, some of the efficiency comes from not having to handle higher-precision math, certain DRAM issues, and other forms of AI besides convolutional neural nets.)
 
Companies have mostly been tuning their technologies to work best for their particular niches. For example, Irvine, Calif.,-startup Syntiant uses analog processing in flash-memory to boost performance for very-low power, low-demand applications. While Google’s original tensor processing unit’s powers would be wasted on anything other than the data center’s high-performance, high-power environment.
 
With this research Nvidia is trying to demonstrate that one technology can work well in all those situations. Or at least it can if the chips are linked together with Nvidia’s mesh network in a multichip module. These modules are basically small printed circuit boards or slivers of silicon that hold multiple chips in a way that they can be treated as one large IC. They are becoming increasingly fashionable, because they allow systems composed of a few of smaller chips—often called chiplets—instead of a single larger and more expensive chip.
 
“The multichip module option has a lot of advantages not just for future scalable [deep learning] accelerators but for building version of our products that have accelerators for different functions,” explains Dally.
 
Key to the Nvidia multichip module’s capability to bind together the new deep learning chips is an interchip network that uses a technology called ground-referenced signaling. As its name implies, GRS uses the difference between a voltage signal on a wire and a common ground to transfer data, while avoiding many of the known pitfalls of that approach. It can transmit 25 gigabits/s using a single wire, whereas most technologies would need a pair of wires to reach that speed. Using single wires boosts how much data you can stream off of each millimeter of the edge of the chip to a whopping terabit per second. What’s more, GRS’s power consumption is a mere picojoule per bit.
 
“It’s a technology that we manufactured to essentially give the option of building multichip modules on an organic substrate, as opposing to on a silicon interposer, which is much more expensive technology,” says Dally.
 
The accelerator chip presented at VLSI is hardly the last word on AI from Nvidia. Dally says they’ve already done a version that essentially acts this chip’s TOPS/W. “We believe we can do better than that,” he says. His team aspires to find inferencing accelerating techniques that blow past the VLSI prototype’s 9.09 TOPS/W and reaches 200 TOPS/W while still being scalable.



This article is originally posted on Tronserve.com

American chip startup SiFive perceives an opportunity to gain ground in China amid the intensifying trade war by offering an open-source alternative for chip design that could help reduce the country's reliance on Western technology.

Semiconductor industry exchange traded funds jumped following President Donald Trump said he could perhaps reverse the banning on telecom giant Huawei and renewed talks with China, but traders are now taking a harder look at the long-term outlook for the sector.

There is certainly much ado about Huawei’s challenging road ahead as key US partners and major parts suppliers have decided to turn their backs on the world’s second-largest smartphone vendor to the end of a 90-day reprieve issued straight after President Trump’s announcement of a potentially business-ending ban.

As announced earlier, Facebook released an exciting new cryptocurrency coming in 2020 – Libra. Characterized as a new digital wallet for new digital currency, the new financial service allows consumers to keep their cryptocurrency safe, as well as make various transactions.

The 45,000 sq ft facility is positioned in Newmarket, Ontario and is the company’s second North American facility after the 2013 opening of a factory in California.
 
“As regular auto manufacturing is withdrawing from Canada, municipalities across the country are re-doubling their initiatives to handle climate change through zero-emissions transit,” said Ted Dowling, Vice President, BYD Canada. “BYD is well-placed to duplicate in Canada the kind of rapid growth we’ve seen in places like Lancaster, California — a plant which started with about 100 workers in 2013, and now employs more than 750. Along with our partners in York Region and the town of Newmarket we’re going to put Canada on the map as a North American leader in Electric Bus assembly,” said Dowling.
 
In its June 25 press release, the Shenzhen based company said its new plant would first be paying attention on delivering buses for the Toronto Transit Commission, who have obtained 10 pure electric buses with the option of a further 30.
 
BYD cited analysis by the US Department of Transportation which said its buses eliminate 10 tons of nitrogen oxides, 350 pounds of diesel particulate matter and approximately 1,690 tons of CO2 over their 12-year lifecycles.
 
“We are devoted to partnering with municipalities across Canada, and we are passionate about our mission to create a cleaner environment here in North America and across the globe,” said BYD President Stella Li.



This article is originally posted on Tronserve.com

Japan has discussed its purpose to fasten regulations on exports of some high-tech materials such as smartphone displays and chips to South Korea as the ongoing dispute over South Koreans who were made to work for Japanese companies during WW2 rages on.
 
Speaking to reporters following a meeting with authorities from the presidential office and government ministries, Cho Jeong-sik from the Democratic Party, commented: “We are carrying out a preliminary feasibility analysis (on the investment).”
 
It is regarded that the export curbs could influence production of South Korea-based giants, Samsung Electronics, and SK Hynix, with the two chemicals targeted regarded as crucial.
 
The data company, HIS Markit, verified that Japanese trade limitations against South Korea is set to add to the global trade tensions. In a note, Len Jelinek, executive director of semiconductor research at IHS Markit, said: “A reducing or elimination in the availability of these materials will considerably impede the production of memory and other semiconductor chips, impacting major semiconductor manufacturers including Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix.”



This article is originally posted on Tronserve.com

Entitled ‘How robots modify the world: what automation actually means for jobs and productivity’, the report says that the fast pace of technological progress implies that robots will be able to take over ever more of the tasks once carried out by humans.
 
Some its key findings consist of the fact that there are three times as many robots in use worldwide as there were 20 years ago, up to 2.25mn. In the next 20 years, Oxford Economics cites trends suggesting that figure could achieve 20mn by 2030, with much of the increase being driven by China.
 
The improving use of robots is said to improve productivity and growth, but an approximate 20mn manufacturing jobs are predicted to be lost to robots by 2030, with those losses disproportionately affecting lower-skilled workers and those in poorer economies.
 
As reported in the BBC, however, Oxford Economics also found that a 30% rise in robot installations worldwide would create an calculated $5tn in additional global GDP, and thought from a global perspective, new jobs in yet-to-exist industries will be created at the same rate that existing roles are ruined.



This article is originally posted on Tronserve.com

In a bid to save billions of dollars per year, the shipping industry is graduating from pilot projects and at long last launching to adopt a smattering of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies for real-world, commercial use. Most recently, several large and small shipping companies have turned to Traxens, a French technology firm, to help them deploy IoT devices across their fleets.

Satellites can now set up quantum communications links by using the air during the day rather than just at night, perhaps helping a nigh-unhackable space-based quantum Internet to operate 24/7, a new study from Chinese scientists finds.

Global consumer electronics makers HP, Dell, Microsoft and Amazon are all exploring to shift significant production capacity out of China, joining an emerging exodus that threatens to undermine the country's position as the world's powerhouse for tech gadgets.

China's decision to completely open up foreign ownership of financial firms in 2020, a year sooner than schedule, demonstrates Beijing's concerns toward the expanding number of companies shifting out of the country to escape the fallout of the U.S.-China trade war.

Last month, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory tied up up the installation of the Mars 2020 rover’s 2.1-meter-long robot arm. This is the most strong arm ever installed on a Mars rover. Even though the Mars 2020 rover shares much of its design with Curiosity, the new arm was redesigned to be able to do much more complicated science, drilling into rocks to collect samples that can be saved for later recovery.
 
JPL is well known for growing robots that do astonishing work in unbelievably distant and hostile environments. The Opportunity Mars rover, to name just one example, had a 90-day planned mission but stayed operational for 5,498 days in a robot unfriendly place full of dust and wild temperature swings where even the most basic maintenance or repair is utterly impossible. (Its twin rover, Spirit, operated for 2,269 days.)
 
To learn more about the process behind building robotic systems that are suitable of feats like these, we talked with Matt Robinson, one of the engineers who designed the Mars 2020 rover’s new robot arm.
 
The Mars 2020 rover (which will be officially named through a public contest which opens this fall) is appointed to launch in July of 2020, landing in Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021. The overall design is similar to the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover, named Curiosity, which has been exploring Gale Crater on Mars since August 2012, except Mars 2020 will be a bit bigger and capable of doing even more amazing science. It will outweigh Curiosity by about 150 kilograms, but it’s alternatively about the same size, and uses the same type of radioisotope thermoelectric generator for power. Upgraded aluminum wheels will be more durable than Curiosity’s wheels, which have suffered significant wear. Mars 2020 will land on Mars in the same way that Curiosity did, with a mildly insane descent to the surface from a rocket-powered hovering “skycrane.”
 
Mars 2020 really steps it up when it comes to science. The most intriguing new capability (besides serving as the base station for a highly experimental autonomous helicopter) is that the rover will be able to take surface samples of rock and soil, put them into tubes, seal the tubes up, and then cache the tubes on the surface for later retrieval (and potentially return to Earth for analysis). Obtaining the samples is the job of a drill on the end of the robot arm that can be prepared with a diversity of interchangeable bits, but the arm holds a number of other tools as well. A “turret” can swap between the drill, a mineral identification sensor suite called SHERLOC, and an X-ray spectrometer and camera called PIXL. Fundamentally, most of Mars 2020’s science work is going to rely on the arm and the hardware that it holds, both in terms of close-up surface investigations and collecting samples for caching.
 
Matt Robinson is the Deputy Delivery Manager for the Sample Caching System on the Mars 2020 rover, which discusses the robotic arm itself, the drill at the end of the arm, and the sample caching system within the body of the rover that manages the samples. Robinson has been at JPL since 2001, and he’s worked on the Mars Phoenix Lander mission as the robotic arm flight software designer and robotic arm test and operations engineer, as well as on Curiosity as the robotic arm test and operations lead engineer.
 
The way that I look at it is, when you’re making an arm that’s going to go to another planet earth, all the things that could go wrong… You have to build something that’s robust and that can endure all that. It’s not that we’re trying to overdesign arms so that they’ll end up lasting much, much longer, it’s that, given all the things that you can experience within a fairly unknown atmosphere, and the level of robustness of the design you have to apply, it just so happens we end up with designs that end up lasting a lot longer than they do. Which is great, but we’re not held to that, although we’re very excited when we see them last that long. Without any calibration, without any maintenance, exactly, it’s amazing. They show their wear over time, but they still operate, it’s super exciting, it’s very motivating to see.



This article is originally posted on Tronserve.com

Over the last 12-18 months, FELIXprinters has experienced a transition as a business with an intentional repositioning towards industrial 3D printing. The obvious result of this is the start of the new Pro Series platforms, which consist of the Pro 3 and the Pro L/XL. This family of machines incorporate all of the current engineering know-how and expertise from the FELIXprinters team, all with engineering backgrounds that have listened to what their industrial clients have been telling them about the pain points often experienced with 3D printing.
 
Time and again, the feedback came through — reliability, consistent reliability, ease of use and a good return on investment through a practical price/performance ratio were the factors in the 3D printing equation that industrial users want and need to perform their daily tasks.
 
There is no refuting that companies deciding on 3D printing as a manufacturing tool are confronted with a dizzying array of choices and voices, particularly when it comes to desktop 3D printers, like the FELIX Pro 3. Many of them saying the same thing, along the lines of 'Our 3D printer offers the accuracy / reliability / ease of use that you are looking for.'
 
Some of them do live up to the rhetoric, but many, specially those at the lower end of the pricing scale, do not. Thus, once the 3D printer is put to work the lack of reliability, poor print output, high failure rates, and time-consuming operation become obvious and create frustration from the time and effort involved to make the system function — even at a basic level. Within an industrial environment this is just not good enough.
 
Throughout its history, FELIXprinters has achieved a strong reputation for developing and delivering robust, reliable and accurate 3D printers, at a price that is comparable with less functional alternatives. The company is conscious that these words may sound the same as other 3D printing companies out there, so here we explain what we mean by reliability, consistent accuracy, ease of use and accessible pricing with particular reference to the FELIX Pro 3 platform, part of the Pro family. Furthermore, we will provide insight into how we attain this and go on to back up our words through our post-sales service and lifetime upgrade options.
 
Reliability & Consistent Accuracy
 
The FELIXprinters Pro 3 builds on the previous generations of the system with new, novel features engineered from the ground up. The Pro 3 was the first FELIX platform to incorporate an innovative dual head printing system. It has been built from the ground up to enable a major improvement in print quality as well as consistent clarity. This claim can mostly be attributed to sensors located in the printing head for filament flow detection. If a problem, such as filament working out or a clogged nozzle, occurs the print is stopped straight away, the issue is raised and a failed print is prevented. This saves valuable time and prevents wasted filament.
 
Other key features of the Pro 3 that contribute to its reliability include the optimized extruder heater, which reduces dual head printing time by 50%. Moreover, print repeatability, that can be relied upon, is improved through obtaining temperature stability in the heater blocks. This is combined with a dual radial blower which produces three times more cooling power that is distributed homogenously and enables the extruder plastic to cool down faster and more evenly. This generates accurately defined print details, including overhangs.
 
When we say reliable, we mean reliable and invite you to challenge us.
 
Ease of Use
 
Right out of the box, the FELIX Pro 3 3D printer is straight and can be set to print within minutes. We have tested this over and over - with our team and with users. Again there are a number of feature details, specifically built into the platform by the FELIX team, that ensure the 3D printing experience with the FELIX Pro 3 is pain free.
 
This begins even before the first layer is written with the Pro 3's automatic and motorized calibration capability, enabled by the latest probe sensor included in the print-head and motorized bed. A high quality print starts with a properly calibrated machine, which involves:
 
• accurate measurement between the printhead and the print surface
• a properly aligned print surface
• correct height difference between print-head nozzles when using the dual head
• correct distance between nozzles in the XY plane when using the dual head.
 
By automating the calibration plan, users can save up to an hour contrasted with manual tweaking of the machine, to achieve much greater productivity and much less frustration.
 
Another key feature of the FELIX Pro 3 is the proprietary QuickSwap printheads. The design of the printheads on the Pro 3 mean that users can virtually swap out a printhead in 20 seconds or less. It has truly never been so simple, but it makes a huge difference to productivity, simplifies and speeds up maintenance, and gives users with the ability to switch materials quickly and definitely and use different size nozzles as required, without having the change the set-up of the machine.
 
The FELIX Pro 3 also comes with a Flex plate as standard. This saves users time — at least 2-3 minutes per print — which adds up. The Flex plate also avoids damage when removing the printed object
 
The Pro 3 Touch is also provided with an intuitive and painless to use touchscreen, which also lets multi-users, that can associate directly to print-file management capabilities and print-server.
 
Accessibility
 
The accessibility of the FELIX Pro 3 is two-fold, firstly through its ease of use, as described in the section above, making 3D printing accessible to engineering and manufacturing professionals that may not be experienced with 3D printing. However, the second way the FELIX Pro 3 is supplied for companies engaging with 3D printing is through its ideal price performance ratio, which gives superb return on investment (ROI).
 
The perception of 3D printing for industrial applications often includes high capital and running costs as well as high consumable costs. FELIXprinters has realistically leveraged its capabilities and made an wise and concerted move to provide industrial AM solutions, at a price that makes them much more accessible to many industrial customers for a range of product development, engineering and manufacturing applications.
 
The Pro 3 has been designed and manufactured by FELIXprinters to offer the highest possible price / performance ratio in its class, and is available under €3000. The emphasis is on excellence in the build to ensure quality output — a system developed by engineers for engineers.
 
The Pro series, including the Pro 3, are a serious industrial tool that dependable and upgradable. These are just words, but we can back them up with high level service and support guarantees, and invite you to challenge us on any of the points in this article.



This article is originally posted on Tronserve.com

TAMPA, FL - CIRCOR Industrial Valves, a leader in developing and production flow control technologies, introduces the convenient and cost-effective CIRCOR Aftermarket Kits Program. Trim, hardware, actuation, and soft good kits give maintenance technicians a full set of required parts for repairs on any portion of a valve.
 
A sole valve repair can cost thousands of dollars if one contains the cost of electricians, plumbers, welders, cranes, and NDT inspections, not to point out downtime. That is why efficient maintenance teams try to do the most they can whenever a valve undergoes service. Instead of a lone valve part, the CIRCOR Aftermarket Kits Program supplies complete groupings of parts for one of the four principle areas of a valve's construction. With a kit, all applicable parts will be on hand during each repair, so parts with the potential to fail, or approaching decline or end of life can be mended or replaced in one service event with the failing parts. In fact, there is no need to identify the part at issue before starting a repair; simply order a kit, and the right part will be included.
 
The CIRCOR Aftermarket Kits Program allows technicians to replace whole sections of the valve all at once instead of piecemeal. This minimizes the potential for a valve malfunction due to an incomplete repair, and the potential liability of a valve failure after not all recommended parts were cycled out.
The CIRCOR Aftermarket Kits Program offers maintenance personnel everything needed to groom valves to CIRCOR's manufacturer recommendations during each repair or maintenance cycle. Using a CIRCOR certified kit results in extended operation, which means the entire investment in repairs can often be recouped.
 
In addition to providing expert applications engineer consultations to ensure customers receive the correct parts for the repair, CIRCOR includes repairs from CIRCOR-certified technicians.



This article is originally posted on Tronserve.com

During the ’90s an overstimulated stock market and a tech boom led to strong bull market just prior to crashing. Some are drawing parallels between the ‘90s and today’s market conditions, spurring a call to remember the lessons of the past.

The first generation of robotic bees were fashioned to be very bee-like, featuring two flapping wings at bee scale. Basically, bees can do a lot with two wings, so why can’t robots? Turns out there are some reasons why little winged robots are not able to do what bees do, at least for now—things like yaw control has proved to be somewhat tricky, which is one reason why less explicitly bee-like designs that use four wings instead of two are appealing.