This Week in Engineering

5G is the enabling technology for a new generation of smart phones and IoT connected devices, promising low latency, high-bandwidth communications. The commercial potential for the technology is massive, and as it rolls out in the US, an unexpected consequence of 5G has emerged: interference with aircraft radar altimeters. Radar altimeters are safety critical, basic flight instruments for commerci...

Pneumatic tires have been a fundamental technology in Western civilization for well over a century. They are essential for modern transportation, and their manufacturing has a significant CO 2 footprint. In 2020, the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. launched a project to develop an entirely carbon neutral tire, a very difficult task. The company has unveiled a test tire demonstrating progr...

Sony Corporation became famous for innovation in the consumer electronics space, developing the first truly popular transistor pocket radio and of course the Walkman series of portable cassette and CD players. The company has expanded considerably from that consumer sector to include technologies such as electronic materials and smart phones, but much of the company’s recent strategy is centred on...

Decarbonization of the economy is a primary goal of nations worldwide to reduce the effects of global warming. Efforts so far have focused on reducing the burning of fossil fuels through alternates like hydrogen, solar, wind and nuclear energy. But demand for oil and gas are still increasing, and will do so for some years before new technologies render them obsolete. And oil and gas production the...

NASA has launched the DART mission to intercept an asteroid and deflect its path. The purpose is to demonstrate how satellites can be used as kinetic energy impactors to alter the course of asteroids and comets that may be on a collision path with Earth. The European Space Agency is collaborating, and the Italian national space agency has supplied a ride along cubesat to photograph the impact. The...

Aviation industry stalwart Rolls-Royce has announced that a joint program of the UK Aerospace Technology Institute, the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy and Innovate UK called ACCEL, has set new records for speed and time to climb for electric powered aircraft. The single seat aircraft called ”Spirit of Innovation” travelled a 345 mph for 3 km, achieving a p...

Moore's Law famously predicted the rapid rate of increase in integrated circuit gate density. As gate sizes are falling into the low single digit nanometre range however, physical constraints on future development are likely. Quantum computing promises to deliver orders of magnitude better performance than conventional binary devices, and IBM has launched a new quantum processor called Eagle, whic...

Mining is both an essential human activity, and a surprising contributor to global CO2 emissions, at 4 to 7 percent of global production. Caterpillar is working with Canadian mining firm Nouveau Monde Graphite to create a fully carbon neutral mine using electric vehicle technology. Access to zero carbon hydroelectric power at the miner’s Québec site is a major enabler, and other firms are working...

Swedish technology company Einride has inked a deal with Haier owned GE Appliances to grid a network of SAE level for self-driving electric cargo carriers for intracompany use. The units include a box truck and a flatbed capable of carrying standard 20-foot shipping containers. Einride expects to hire 2000 as the firm expands from its New York-based to include technology centres in California and...

The U.S. Air Force has announced that Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska will be the site of the services’ first micro-nuclear reactor. The vendor has not yet been announced, but the selection represents the first firm commitment for production type transportable nuclear power systems for base use. The Pentagon is operating a joint force development program for micro-reactors called Project Pele in...

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 a...

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, alr...

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 pl...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 se...

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...

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 olde...

Electrostatics have long been a high-efficiency technology for removing pollutants from the air, from residential air cleaners to the electrostatic precipitators in coal-fired power plants. A new use for this technology has been developed by an MIT spinoff that promises to capture water vapour emitted by industrial and commercial cooling towers. Captured water is pure enough to be practical for hu...

Thorium is long been considered a safer, better alternative than uranium for fission based nuclear power projects. Molten salt designs promise all the nonproliferation benefits of thorium, plus simpler, more cost-effective reactor designs combined with intrinsic safety. But the Chinese and the US have started work on molten salt reactor projects the promise to take this promising technol...

In the billionaires’ space race, Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson, SpaceX’s Elon Musk and Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos have been vying to be the first to fly into space. Branson has won the impromptu contest, flying into suborbital space aboard the VSS Unity, as part of a test crew to validate Virgin Galactic’s commercial flight service before public operations. Bezos is scheduled to fly on a Bl...

Nuclear fusion has been the Holy Grail of power generation for over half a century. The promise is considerable: clean, essentially limitless energy. Multiple approaches to sustained nuclear fusion have been tried and are currently in research, from giant multibillion-dollar tokomaks to mechanically induced shockwave driven liquid metal devices. Colorado-based Electric Fusion System...

General Electric has announced an Australian project to supply a turnkey powerplant with unique multifuel capability. The gas turbine plant will be capable of operating on natural gas and hydrogen blends, with hydrogen enrichment ranging from 5% to 100%. The novel powerplant will be supported by state and federal programs and the power utility has committed to purchasing green hydrogen g...