Heraeus Holding GmbH, a global Fortune 500 company, announced it has invested substantial equity to take a majority stake in perPETual Technologies, one of the world’s leading PET recycling companies.

To drive global expansion under one brand, Heraeus decided to rename the company “revalyu Resources GmbH” (“revalyu”).

PET, which stands for polyethylene terephthalate, is the most common thermoplastic polymer of the polyester family and is used in textiles, packaging containers for liquids and foods, thermoforming for manufacturing and many other consumer products.

revalyu has developed a breakthrough and environmentally sustainable depolymerization technology to recycle post consumer PET bottles into sustainable esters (monomers), which is the base chemical building block for anything polyester based. revalyu’s Polymer can be used to manufacture high quality sustainable PET products. Today, the company produces filament yarns for the textile industry in its manufacturing facility in Nashik, India. It currently employs around 300 people.

“revalyu is driven by innovation and fits perfectly into our portfolio”, said Jan Rinnert, Chairman of the Board of Managing Directors and CEO of Heraeus Holding GmbH. Rinnert says the global strength of Heraeus will provide the investment, infrastructure and strategic support needed to accelerate revalyu’s growth. “We aim to develop the business into one of the world’s largest and technologically advanced PET recycling companies”, Rinnert added.

“We are a pioneer in recycling PET bottles. After several years of hard work by the team and support from our shareholders and customers, we have built the world’s most innovative, technology leading and environmentally sustainable PET recycling plant in the world based in Nashik, India” said Dr. Vivek Tandon, Founder of perPETual Technologies to be renamed revalyu Resources.

“Together with Heraeus we will strongly focus on rapidly expanding our production capacity in India and globally. Our aim is to recycle 100 million bottles a day of used PET Bottles by 2026, which will be a big step toward solving the PET waste problem”, Vikram Nagargoje, Co-founder and COO.

revalyu’s technology offers a cost-effective continuous recycling process, which extracts dirt and impurities more efficiently thereby delivering high purity recycled PET. It also uses 91 percent less energy and 75 percent less water than conventional processes for producing PET polymers. It can be used in all PET production processes.

“revalyu Resources will become the leading global brand for recycling polyester. Our customers do not have to compromise any more between their ambitious sustainability goals and high quality requirements”, Dr. Tandon stated.

https://www.heraeus.com/

ABB Robotics has collaborated with two world-renowned artists, eight year old Indian child prodigy Advait Kolarkar and Dubai-based digital design collective Illusorr, to create the world’s first robot-painted art car. ABB’s award-winning PixelPaint technology has, without human intervention, perfectly recreated Advait’s swirling, monochromatic design as well as Illusorr’s tri-color geometrical patterns.

Equipped with 1,000 nozzles in the printer head, ABB’s IRB 5500 paint robots were able to complete the highly complex artworks in less than 30 minutes. The PixelPaint technology demonstrates unprecedented precision and speed, capturing intricate, elaborate detail that would be impossible to achieve by hand. A film highlighting this world-first achievement can be seen here.

Sami Atiya, President of ABB’s Robotics & Discrete Automation business area, commented: “ABB’s PixelPaint technology is more than an evolution – it is a revolution. It’s a shining example of how robotic automation and our RobotStudio® software can not only pave the way for more sustainable manufacturing but can also perfectly replicate delicate pieces of art that celebrate the originality and beauty of the human spirit. At a time when consumers want more customized products, PixelPaint is a game changer and allows any design to be replicated in a manner that is both sustainable and affordable.”

ABB’s ground-breaking PixelPaint technology reimagines the paint application process and reflects the growing demand for sustainable personalization in the automotive industry, particularly in exterior paint. Multi-colored car painting has traditionally been a laborious and costly process involving multiple stages of masking and unmasking, but ABB’s technology allows for a detailed, colorful, and exact replication of any design.

Carefully controlled, the paint can be quickly applied in a single application. This breakthrough in the automation of the paint process opens the door to specialized and personalized designs to the automotive market.

Influential automotive designer, Ian Callum, responsible for the design of the Aston Martin Vanquish and more recently the ground-breaking Jaguar I-Pace said: “There’s something very special about a car. People get emotionally attached to them and the importance of personalization is becoming stronger and stronger. In fact, I’m working with customers who actually want the whole car designed in a bespoke way. So this paint offering – with all sorts of new levels of individual design for a motor car – is incredible.”

PixelPaint technology also enhances manufacturing sustainability, removing the need for masking materials and extra ventilation, which lowers emissions while saving water and energy. Coordinated by the firm’s RobotStudio software, the paint head tracks very closely to the vehicle body to ensure 100 percent of the paint is applied to the car with no airborne misting. Different paint colors are applied quickly, with the product only running through the paint shop once. For car manufacturers, this can halve the production time and reduce costs by up to 60 percent.

To create the art car, ABB refurbished a Volkswagen SUV that was damaged in the catastrophic floods in Germany in the summer of 2021. Its recycling confirms ABB’s commitment to sustainability wherever possible.

Sami Atiya added: “We are in the midst of a significant decade in the history of the automotive industry and the start of a new era. Automakers need to consider new ways of working towards the transition to electric vehicles. We are working to support the industry in this transition and I’m confident that with flexible automation, sustainable transportation will fast become reality.”

https://new.abb.com/

EconCore, world leader in technologies for economic honeycomb sandwich production, has collaborated with partner Flaxco®, to develop and manufacture an innovative new thermoplastic honeycomb sandwich panel.

Flaxco established themselves in the early 1850’s and have 150 years of experience in flax weaving, used in a range of applications including clothing, upholstery and decoration. This has evolved into manufacturing flax fibres for the composites industry, typically found in semi-finished products such as sandwich panels.

In 2020 Flaxco approached EconCore suggesting combination of thermoplastic honeycomb technology with Flaxco’s flax fibre technology. The polypropylene honeycomb material produced by EconCore offers a high-performance-to-weight ratio along with efficient energy absorption.

This is achieved through the materials synonymous honeycomb shaped hollow cells which support sandwich sheets to provide levels of high rigidity with minimal weight. Pioneering the use of flax with honeycomb technology, the partnership sees Flaxco’s flax fabric composite skins combined with EconCore polypropylene core to produce sandwich panels.

In order to generate high level of stiffness, sandwich cores require surface layers, like the neatly woven layers that Flaxco have the means to create. Once created the panels can be thermoformed thanks to their thermoplastic properties. This is typically done by means of short cycle compression moulding.

In order to achieve a product with well-balanced characteristics, pre-pregs of 0.5-1mm thickness were used. By optimising flax technology with the polypropylene honeycomb core Flaxco is able to achieve much higher levels of rigidity. The table below describes the bending performance of a sandwich panel with flax composite skins.

Flax fibres are a 100% natural fibre that produce lower CO2 levels than competitor materials including glass and carbon fibres, an increasingly important element within the automotive industry. Furthermore, research and testing are already underway for the material to find its place within the sports industry.

With high levels of cost efficiency compared to more conventional materials, the new Flaxco composite is expected to be the material of choice in a number of applications, especially those requiring dimensional stability. The new material aims to not only be used in new markets and applications but also replace non-sustainable materials already in use.

Dr. Jochen Pflug, EconCore CEO added: “For new product developments sustainable materials have become a key requirement. Within the automotive industry in particular, suppliers seek sustainable materials which lower their CO2 footprint.”

Dr. Pflug continued: “Flaxco’s natural flax fibre polypropylene composites are an ideal combination with our polypropylene honeycomb cores to achieve a sustainable material that retains high levels of performance. The production costs of thick monolithic laminates are high because many layers need to be combined, our honeycombs increase the stiffness and strength but require only a minimal amount of material in two thin surface layers.”

One factor that has greatly benefitted the partnership between Flaxco and EconCore is the locations of their facilities. With both EconCore and Flaxco being based in Belgium, allowing for a local supply chain. Throughout both the design and manufacturing stages the advantages of this proved its advantages with regular stable deliveries and less transport being required, essential when one crisis after the other affects the transportation chains, from the Coronavirus pandemic to the recent raw material shortages.

Ludwig Ryckebosch, Innovation and Business Development Manager at Flaxco said: “It was a match made in heaven. EconCore’s polypropylene honeycomb has been incredibly easy to work with. Its lightweight properties meant that it was the perfect choice to combine with our technology to develop flax fibre composite material.”

The flax composite material is expected to have commercial applications across many industries, especially automotive interiors and computer casings. With sustainability being a key focus for companies across the globe, this all-new flax composite’s ability to be recycled without compromising on performance will play its role in reducing carbon emissions.

https://econcore.com/

Google Cloud announced the launch of Manufacturing Data Engine and Manufacturing Connect, two new solutions that enable manufacturers to connect historically siloed assets, process and standardize data, and improve visibility from the factory floor to the cloud. Once data is harmonized, the solutions enable three critical AI- and analytics-based use cases–manufacturing analytics & insights, predictive maintenance, and machine-level anomaly detection.

Manufacturers are undertaking a massive digital transformation driven by rising customer expectations, supply chain volatility, shifting buyer behavior, and more. Yet, only 21% of manufacturers have active AI initiatives in production to help solve these issues. While data from disparate systems can be manually prepared for AI and analytics pilots, siloed data sets still need to be accessible centrally and in real-time to support production scale. Additionally, many existing AI and analytics solutions are designed to be used by data scientists and are not easy to use for manufacturing business leaders.

Manufacturing Data Engine and Manufacturing Connect, available today, help manufacturers unify their data and empower their workforce with easy-to-use analytics and AI solutions based on cloud infrastructure:

• Manufacturing Data Engine is an end-to-end solution that processes, contextualizes, and stores factory data on Google Cloud’s market-leading data platform. It provides a configurable and customizable blueprint for the ingestion, transformation, storage, and access to factory data. It integrates key Google Cloud products, including Cloud Dataflow, PubSub, BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Looker, Vertex AI, Apigee, and more, into a manufacturing-specific solution.
• Manufacturing Connect is a factory edge platform co-developed with Litmus Automation that quickly connects to, and streams data from, nearly any manufacturing asset and industrial system to Google Cloud, based on an extensive library of more than 250 machine protocols. Deep integration with the Manufacturing Data Engine unlocks rapid data intake into Google Cloud for processing machine and sensor data. The ability to deploy containerized applications and ML models to the edge enables new dimensions of use cases.

Once data is centralized and harmonized by the Manufacturing Data Engine and Manufacturing Connect, it can then be used to address a growing set of industry-specific use cases, including:

• Manufacturing analytics & insights, which helps manufacturers quickly create custom dashboards to visualize key data—from factory KPIs such as Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), to individual machine sensor data. Integrated with the Manufacturing Data Engine, engineers and plant managers can automatically set up new machines and factories, enabling standardized dashboards, KPIs, and on-demand drill-downs into the data to uncover new insights opportunities throughout the factory. These can then be shared easily across the enterprise and with partners.
• Machine-level anomaly detection, which helps manufacturers identify anomalies as they occur and provides alerts—leveraging Google Cloud’s Time Series Insights API—on real-time machine and sensor data such as noise, vibration, or temperature.
• Predictive maintenance, which enables manufacturers to anticipate an asset’s need for service, helping reduce downtime and maintenance cost. Manufacturers can leverage ML models and high-accuracy AI optimizations that are deployable in weeks.

“Bridging gaps across systems and placing easy-to-use AI directly into the hands of manufacturing engineers leads to better results,” said Hans Thalbauer, Managing Director, Supply Chain and Manufacturing Industries, Google Cloud. “These new solutions can support workforce transformation initiatives by providing engineers with the tools to be self-sufficient, without the need for data scientists or additional integration code.”

“The growing amount of sensor data generated on our assembly lines creates an opportunity for smarter analytics around product quality, production efficiency and equipment health monitoring, but it also means new data intake and management challenges,” said Jason Ryska, Director Manufacturing Technology Development, Ford Motor Company. “We worked with Google Cloud to implement a data platform now operating on more than 100 key machines connected across two plants, streaming and storing over 25 million records per week. We’re gaining strong insights from the data that will help us implement predictive and preventive actions and continue to become even more efficient in our manufacturing plants.”

“With the tight integration of a powerful factory edge solution with Google Cloud, it is easier than ever for factories to tap into cloud capabilities,” said Masaharu Akieda, General Manager, Digital Solutions Division, KYOCERA Communication Systems Co., Ltd. “Google Cloud’s solutions enable a broader group of users beyond data scientists to quickly access, analyze and use data in a variety of use cases. We are excited to partner with Google Cloud as we implement new manufacturing solutions to optimize production operations and consistently increase quality.”

“As the global innovator of solid state cooling and heating technology, we’ve developed a sustainable manufacturing platform that uses less water, less electricity, and less chemical waste,” says Jason Ruppert, Chief Operations Officer, Phononic. “This partnership with Google Cloud allows us to contextualize data across all of our manufacturing processes – ultimately providing us the analytics and insights to optimize our operations and continue to bring to the world products that cool sustainably, reducing greenhouse gas (GhG) emissions and improving the environment.”

https://cloud.google.com/