This Week in Engineering

In a significant and unexpected move, Ford Motor Company has announced production cuts of the all-electric F150 Lightning, assembled at the Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Michigan. Light trucks and sport utility vehicles are the most sold, highest margin vehicles in America, and industry analysts attribute slow EV adoption in this segment to several factors. * * * Want to watch this podcast as a...

NASA’s new X-59 supersonic research aircraft is poised to crack the most vexing problem of commercial faster-than-sound travel: Sonic boom. The unique shape of the aircraft manages shockwave formation and is anticipated to reduce the window-rattling noise of sonic booms to a thump no louder than the slamming of a car door. If it works, a new generation of supersonic commercial airliners may be fre...

For a decade after the Wright Brothers’ 1903 flight, inventors, dreamers and entrepreneurs operating out of barns and sheds all over the world built radical prototypes to turn aviation from a dangerous hobby into a practical proposition. Today, there’s a modern equivalent of that excitement in the electric vertical takeoff and landing space. The eVTOL industry has reached an important milestone, w...

In a blockbuster takeover, Nippon Steel has bought the iconic American producer United States Steel in a $14 billion deal. The combined company will have a global steel output of 86 million tons and is part of Nippon Steel’s program to achieve 100 million tons of global annual production. * * * Want to watch this podcast as a video? This Week in Engineering  is available on engineering.com TV...

*This is our last episode of 2023! We'll be back again the week of January 8th.* Stockholm, Sweden based Corpower Ocean has developed a standalone generation source the company calls a Wave Energy Converter, a floating generator unit tethered to a seabed anchor. The converter is essentially a floating bouy, resembling a giant sport fishing float or “bobber”, containing a novel mechanism. As the co...

A new set of Biden administration restrictions on foreign sourced EV raw materials and components may constrain production growth just as the need for zero emission vehicles to meet EPA requirements increases. With China controlling several key minerals, the race is on to develop alternate sources, but current tax credit regimes have MSRP restrictions, putting engineers in a classic bind: increase...

Two Québec, Canada-based companies, Limosa and Airmedic, have announced a partnership to develop an electric VTOL medevac aircraft that combines the benefits of helicopters and fixed wing aircraft for this time critical mission profile. The aircraft, made by Limosa, is called Limomedic and will be operated by medevac service provider Airmedic for emergency services in Québec. Canada has many isola...

The rapid, global push toward electric vehicles has put a premium on extraction of several critical minerals. Lithium is the most important, but others such as copper, cobalt, nickel and other metals will be needed in large quantities to facilitate large-scale battery production. Caterpillar and Freeport McMorRan have announced a project to automate the company’s fleet of ore hauling heavy equipme...

Numerous government-supported and private launch providers are in the market today, and from a cost perspective, the current leader is SpaceX. But, on November 2nd, China’s iSpace launched and landed their Hyperbola-2 test stage in a successful hop that demonstrated the company’s throttleable engine technology and precision landing capability. * * * Want to watch this podcast as a video? This Week...

NASA is adding a fourth crewed spacecraft for ISS transportation with Sierra Space's Dream Chaser. Why? It’s part of a long-range NASA goal to increase competition in the commercial space industry and to provide redundancy to ensure uninterrupted station resupply and operations. * * * Want to watch this podcast as a video? This Week in Engineering  is available on engineering.com TV along wit...

Robotics maker ABB has announced a collaboration with Porsche Consulting to create a pilot project to develop new techniques for modular housing manufacturing. The market is wide open, with construction lagging other engineering sectors in the use of automation.  * * * Want to watch this podcast as a video? This Week in Engineering  is available on engineering.com TV along with all of ou...

Blended wing body airframe design has long been known to be a high-performance solution to the traditional limits on payload, range and endurance in large aircraft. The USAF ordered flying wing bombers just after World War II, and while performance benefits were demonstrated, blended wing body designs have not been applied to large transport aircraft. This may be changing, as the USAF are leading...

Artificial intelligence algorithms are incredibly complex, needing the enormous power of supercomputers to operate. OpenAI’s ChatGPT runs on a Microsoft-built supercomputer powered by 10,000 Nvidia GPU’s. It’s expensive, and power-hungry, and the company is aiming to improve performance and reduce reliance on a single chip supplier. The result may be a new in-house semiconductor design unit at the...

The electrification of aviation is a difficult challenge. The high weight of batteries, and the resulting short range and limited payload that results, have limited applications of electric drive to smaller, propeller-driven general aviation aircraft. But flight training, which typically uses smaller, short range piston powered aircraft, is ideal for electrification. Denver-based Bye Aerospace has...

Critics of the transition from the internal combustion engine to electric vehicles point out that many obstacles remain to full adoption. These include high costs, unknown electrical grid capacity and, importantly, access to the critical minerals necessary to create the all-important battery packs. With car battery technology, lithium is the key metal, and like other strategic inputs, most of the...

This summer, the legendary Danish toy manufacturer LEGO announced a breakthrough: lasting bricks made from recycled PET, derived from soda bottles. The research project was considerable, requiring a staff of 150 working through 250 different plastic compositions to create a recycled plastic brick that met LEGO’s tough quality standards. Although an engineering success, the company announced the su...

Wireless optical power relays may revolutionize energy distribution. * * * Want to watch this podcast as a video? This Week in Engineering  is available on engineering.com TV along with all of our other shows such as End of the Line, Designing the Future, Manufacturing the Future, and the Engineering Roundtable.

The perfection of the internal combustion engine has been sought for almost 150 years. In the process, some innovative and downright odd designs have emerged. Granada, Spain-based INNengine has developed an innovative opposed piston design that does away with crankshafts, replacing them with rotary cam tracks, the pistons functioning in a way similar to roller lifters in pushrod overhead valve eng...

Space-based Internet connectivity as a retail product was pioneered by Elon Musk’s Starlink and players such as Amazon, as well as dedicated space data startups, are clamoring to fill the skies with small sat networks to provide direct-to-home data. Barcelona-based Satelliot plans to take this concept to the next level, with 5G connectivity from orbit that operates seamlessly with existing terrest...

Hydrogen fuel cell stacks have been produced commercially since the 1960s, mainly for military and space exploration tasks. Handmade, delicate and expensive, the mass production problem has been a major inhibitor to the widespread adoption of fuel cells as a mass-market power source. U.K.-based Bramble Energy has developed a manufacturing technique for hydrogen fuel cell stacks that uses an existi...

The XB-1 will pave the way for commercial supersonic flight, but challenges remain.  Regularly scheduled, commercial supersonic flight became a reality half a century ago with Concorde, but the high costs associated with supersonic aircraft technology doomed the project to commercial failure, despite its engineering excellence. Boom Supersonic is moving forward with an 80-seat composite faste...

How long does it take to become a major automaker? Vietnam founded and Singapore-based Vinfast has rocketed from a well financed startup in 2017 to a significant producer of electric vehicles. Vinfast has now announced that the company has started construction of a four-billion-dollar US production facility in North Carolina. Production is expected to begin in 2025.   * * * Want to watch...

Cluster munitions, frequently called “cluster bombs,” have an engineering history that dates back to World War II, when the German Air Force used the weapon against Allied civilian and military targets. As the name implies, cluster munitions are canisters of anywhere from a handful to several thousand small explosives which are designed to scatter widely and explode over a very large area. Unexplo...

Cluster munitions, frequently called “cluster bombs,” have an engineering history that dates back to World War II, when the German Air Force used the weapon against Allied civilian and military targets. As the name implies, cluster munitions are canisters of anywhere from a handful to several thousand small explosives which are designed to scatter widely and explode over a very large area. Unexplo...

The catastrophic loss of OceanGate’s Titan submersible with all hands aboard has triggered widespread speculation regarding the cause of the accident. Inadequate design, insufficient testing and the use of carbon fiber as a structural material have all been suggested as contributing factors. Carbon fiber is a well-characterized material that is strong and light, making it a favourite for weight-cr...