Tech for Good

2022-01-05 15:36:41 3D printing of rockets

We have talked about #3dprint -ing of various stuff - homes, prosthetics, wood objects, human skulls. But what about printing rockets?

With the world's largest 3D metal printer, Relativity Space startup aims to print an entire space rocket, including fuel tanks and rocket engines, in just 60 days.

The way the printer works is the combination of lasers and plasma arc discharge melting raw material, an aluminum wire. The melting point of aluminum is 660 degrees Celsius (1221 F). So the printer melts the whole body of the rocket one tiny bit at a time, 10 inches a second (25 cm/s), to be more exact.

To build a traditional rocket, you first need to make building tools. For NASA's next rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), it took 11 years of development to construct the vertical assembly center (VAC), a 170 foot (52 m) tool for welding together the rocket sections. In contrast, Relativity Space is only five years old, and they plan to launch their first rocket, Terran One, in 2022.

One of the other benefits of 3D printing is reducing the parts number. Imagine how hot the rocket's combustion chamber gets. The temperature inside is enough to boil iron. How does it not melt? Well, liquid hydrogen passes over and cools it. It is so cool that you can freeze stuff to the exterior of the chamber. That system has 1080 individual small pipes, all having to be welded together. It is an incredibly labor-intensive task. But with 3D printing, you can build all these small (about a 20th the thickness of a human hair) cooling channels as one piece with the chamber.

Logically, with a hundred times fewer parts, the 3D-printed rocket's cost is lower than a traditional one. The Relativity Space founder Tim Ellis says it is already five times less, and eventually, they can get to ten or even a hundred times less.

The first rocket, Terran One, will be a low earth orbit one. The second one, Terran R, can send a payload to the moon, to Mars. Launching to Mars and building an industrial base on the red planet is actually a long-term vision of the company. As Tim Ellis puts it, "it would expand the possibilities of human experience and what it means to be a person. Like we'd have YouTube channels on Mars, and people sharing what life on Mars is like versus earth."

It looks like Tim is not alone in that vision: the company's valuation vaulted to $4.2 billion after a $650 million funding round in summer 2021.

Terran One nose cone timelapse
If you're interested here is the longer video (20 minutes)

#space #3dprint #startups Open / Comment

2022-01-03 13:30:54 Autonomous trucks on the rise

Autonomous trucking startup TuSimple has completed its first fully-autonomous run on open public roads without a human in the vehicle.

An 80-mile (130 km) run along surface streets and highways between a railyard in Tuscon, Arizona, and a distribution center in Phoenix took 1 hour and 20 minutes.

Unmarked police vehicles followed at about a mile behind the truck in case of an emergency stop. A survey vehicle was operating five miles ahead to look for anomalies. An oversight vehicle followed a half-mile behind. Other than these safety precautions, there was no human intervention.

That creates a milestone for TuSimple, aiming to full-scale its technology by 2024. TuSimple is one of the most well-known autonomous truck startups surpassing a $1 billion valuation since its 2015 launch. The company develops its own proprietary automated vehicle guidance system that uses AI paired with LiDAR, radar, and HD cameras. Currently, TuSimple retrofits the existing Navistar base trucks with its system. It also plans to design semi-trucks specifically for autonomous operations by 2024.

The autonomous truck market is not getting mass attention as the self-driving passenger cars. However, that does not stop its estimated growth from $2.0 billion in 2021 to $4.3 billion by 2026. With the rise of e-commerce, the freight industry faces a lack of freight capacity and an increased demand for truck drivers. Autonomous trucking may be the right solution for that.

Article on TechCrunch

#AI #autonomoustrucks #startups Open / Comment

2021-12-31 12:04:01 I have started TFG at the end of June.

This last post of 2021 is not about more than 1 million views TFG has got this year, though that number is driving me completely nuts.

This post is about YOU.

Thank everyone for your attention, interest in the content, excellent comments; for challenging me with questions. Without you, the community wouldn't exist and wouldn't be so great.

THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!

As for the future, I think we have not even started - so much more to come. So please stay tuned and see you in 2022.

PS. I am starting a top-secret new project in January... Open / Comment

2021-12-30 07:47:17 A Lego-Factory and a Cucumber House

We have talked about 3D printing of houses, even on Mars, but we have never discussed the homes made of cucumbers.

The Brick Wall is a Youtube channel with creative Lego projects. They make fun by helping Lego do unexpected things, like the snow blow train cleaning the railway tracks or lego golf ball picker. Could be also a good pick to watch with your kids.

Today's #fun video is about the mega-factory using 18 cucumbers to build a log house. The factory has 21 motors, 7 controllers and consists of more than 23K lego pieces. The video features sharp cutting blades so please be responsible if you try to implement something similar at home ;)

#fun #engineering #robotics Open / Comment

2021-12-29 14:54:28 Think and type

Written communication is critical in our digital world. Imagine the difficulties the patients affected by paralysis are facing in this regard. Blackrock Neurotech, a medical technology company from Salt Lake City, is trying to empower increased independence and quality of life for these people.

Their system allows patients to type text by merely imagining themselves writing or typing the words. The platform consists of an implant, miniaturized electronics, software, and a decoder. As a patient is thinking, electrodes implanted in the brain read the electrical firing patterns of neurons and send those signals through a bundle of five patented machine learning software decoders.

With this tech, patients with limited communication abilities can create text by thinking or imagining themselves typing or writing by hand. In terms of accuracy, Brackrock's system boasts 94% thought-to-text accuracy. That increases to 99% when the computer system autocorrects the text. The eventual goal is to enable communication functions on par with an able-bodied person.

As for the platform's future, the neuroscientists' team sees other benefits, including the restoration of treating or mitigating pain, hearing loss, depression, seizures, memory loss, possibly depression, and many others.

Article on Medgadget

#medtech #meddevice #implant #AI #wearables Open / Comment

2021-12-28 09:52:30 Electronic wall decoration worker

Bangalore-based startup Pace Robotics is building a robot for indoor wall decoration. In India, it turned out, the problems with workers doing repairs are the same as in Russia. There are not enough qualified plasterers and painters. The quality of their work, as well as productivity, is unpredictable and varies from project to project.

Srinivas and Ayushmoy, the startup founders, decided that robots were essential. They have created a prototype of a device that does work, on average, ten times faster than a person and three times cheaper. And, most importantly, your wall will look exactly the same across the entire surface, even if you want to make it textured.

The entrepreneurs have attracted just over $70K in investments. That is a small amount by the standards of Silicon Valley but quite decent for Indian Bangalore.

So far, the team has created only eight copies of the wall decorating robot. We know that the path from this stage to the industrially produced product is thorny and long. But the guys are doing well - there are already four pilot projects, one of which the client paid. The company provides the robot as a service, according to the RaaS model. We will look at them in a year or two. A plasterer-painter priced well below a sports bike for a day of work may come in handy for many.

Article on The Robot Report
Team's investor pitch
Company's website

#robotics #startups #India Open / Comment

2021-12-27 09:17:54 Here's a late summary of the previous week:

An EV company to watch - Arrival startup challenging Henry Ford's approach to manufacturing
AI to help fight strokes - a startup with a software to identify early signs of strokes and help patients get to the operating room fast
An Angel's Office - a UK's building with exceptional sustainable design
Electric motorcycles coming to Africa - A Swedish-Kenyan Opibus and Uber's alliance to bring electric motorcycles to Africa
22 electric vehicles for 2022 - the name speaks for itself

We will have a poll today or tomorrow - I am thinking of something new for you.

Your Tech for Good

#weeksummary Open / Comment

2021-12-24 14:48:23 22 electric vehicles for 2022

Electrek has published a great article with the 22 most anticipated EVs of 2022. Here are the 22 photos with their names.

We have already had a couple of these on TFG. If you wish me to cover any other on the channel, please comment on which one you like.

If we get at least 15 comments, I will be happy to write a post or two about the EVs you mentioned.

Have a good weekend

#EV Open / Comment

2021-12-23 12:33:33 ​Electric motorcycles coming to Africa

The motorcycle industry is the single largest employer in Kenya, estimated to provide jobs for over 1.2 million youth. However, all 1.6 million motorcycles registered in the country still operate on gasoline, causing massive emissions and noise pollution.

A Swedish-Kenyan tech company Opibus changes this by creating its electric motorcycle priced equivalent with its gasoline counterparts. Earlier this year, Opibus closed a $7.5 million funding round, the largest ever for African electric mobility. And now, the company has partnered with Uber to deploy up to 3,000 electric motorcycles in Africa by 2022.

Opibus's electric bike has quite impressive specs. With a top speed of 90 km/h (~56 mph), it can accelerate 0-90 km/h in 5 seconds and has a 160 km (100 mi) range.

Motorcycles are popular in Kenya, especially among the youth who use them for work. Opibus's head of marketing and strategy, Albin Wilson, claims that their bike can lower the cost of running a motorcycle by almost 60% on fuel and maintenance: so many fewer parts that break on electric motorcycles, and the fuel price is ever-rising locally. That could be a big deal for the youth and a win for Opibus.

Article on Electrek
Opibus website

#EV #startups Open / Comment

2021-12-22 09:06:35 An Angel's Office

One Angel Square is an office building located in Manchester, UK, and it is the first building in the UK to achieve BREEAM 'Outstanding' rating.
(BREEAM is the world's leading sustainability assessment method for master-planning projects, infrastructure, and buildings).

What makes this office space so exceptional? The building's design help in achieving an 80% reduction in carbon emissions, 50% reduction in energy consumption, and a reduction in operating costs of up to 30%.

One Angel Square features a double-skinned façade to minimize heating and cooling throughout the year. Underground concrete earth tubes provide an amount of free heating and cooling for incoming fresh air.

Cooled or heated air rises from the basement through various floors to the roof level, where it passes through a heat-exchanger that recycles the heat to warm the incoming air into the offices below. Carbon dioxide sensors regulate the amount of fresh air circulating in the building and reduce the treated air amount.

The building has 300,000sq ft of exposed concrete that forms the ceilings to the office floors. That acts as a thermal sponge absorbing the heat in the building and reducing the amount of energy needed to cool the building.

A rainwater and greywater harvesting systems ensure low water consumption. A combined heat and power (CHP) system powering the building uses waste cooking oil and rapeseed oil as fuel. The system also supplies excess energy back to the grid. It has electrical pool car charging points and features a building user app that relays real-time user information on how the building is performing.

Some interesting photos of the One Angel Square
Article on ArchDaily

#architecture #urbantech #sustainablebuildings Open / Comment