TECHNOLOGY FOCUS
Manufacturing
A roundup of recent advances in engineering technology. In this issue, a look at new advances in the manufacturing sector.
ROBOTIC HOMEBUILDER EXPANDS OPERATIONS
Home construction is a notoriously old-fashioned industry, with teams of workers swarming over a site to build a house from lumber and nails. The labor-intensive nature of homebuilding makes it resistant to the kinds of productivity leaps seen in other industries. Even modular housing, in which large sections of the building are manufactured in a factory and trucked to the site, has been slow to automate.
One manufacturer that has been working to change that is Promise Robotics, which uses off-the-shelf industrial robots to build modular homes. The company recently announced plans to expand its production at an existing 60,000-square-foot warehouse located in Calgary, Alta. According to a company press release, the facility, slated to open in the next few months, will be able to produce up to 1,000,000 square feet of housing annually.
“The high cost and complexity of automation have long kept homebuilders from investing in factories,” said Ramtin Attar, CEO of Promise Robotics, in a press statement. “Our solution removes capital and expertise barriers, enabling builders to adopt automation and scale production confidently.”
The company says its production system is deployable in existing warehouses or temporary structures, which eliminates the need to construct a new factory building. The business model is a factory as a service, managing the automation within one of its pop-up factories while its local partners (most often regional homebuilders) focus on the homebuyers. For instance, the system uses artificial intelligence to digest blueprints to produce instructions for the robots that cut and assemble lumber.
Though the company is starting in Canada, it hopes to soon expand into growing regions of the U.S., such as Houston, Atlanta, and Nashville.
VIETNAMESE SOLAR MANUFACTURER BUILDS NEW U.S. FACTORY
Solar power has transformed the energy industry, but companies that want access to the U.S. market are looking to build factories here rather than importing the solar modules. One new solar module factory is located in Greenville, N.C. The $294 million, state-of-the-art facility will utilize advanced N-Type solar cell technology to produce high-performance monofacial and bifacial photovoltaic modules for residential, commercial, industrial, and utility-scale applications.
The factory is owned by Boviet Solar Technology Co. Ltd., headquartered in Bac Giang City, Vietnam. The company will hold a grand opening for the factory on April 24, 2025.
The factory will be capable of producing enough cells each year to generate 2 GW of electricity.
“The facility is expected to create approximately 908 skilled local jobs and contribute to economic growth and clean energy development in the region,” said Sienna Cen, President of Boviet Solar USA, in a press statement.
ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING PLANT OPENS IN FLORIDA
ATI, the advanced materials and manufacturing company, commissioned a new additive manufacturing production facility in Margate, Fla., in February, designed to print large-scale components for aerospace, defense, and other high-performance industries. The vertically integrated greenfield build includes design, printing, heat treating, machining, and inspection capabilities.
The company announced that the first contract to be produced at the 132,000-square-foot facility is an order from Bechtel Plant Machinery Inc. The components will support the U.S. Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program.
“In this new facility, we’ve brought our materials science and forging expertise together with additive manufacturing production acumen, delivering high-quality production at scale,” said Kimberly A. Fields, ATI President and CEO, in a press statement. “From design to finished product, we’ve formed a powerhouse that solves our customers’ most difficult challenges for the most demanding markets—aerospace, defense and space.”
According to the company, the Margate facility is capable of printing some of the tallest parts in the world, reaching up to 1.5 meters in height. Before the opening of the facility, additively manufacturing parts that large required printing several smaller components and joining them together.
MANUFACTURING WASTE CONVERTED TO HYDROGEN
Steelmaking is a notoriously energy-intensive industry. One way to reduce the overall impact of manufacturing steel is to reuse waste streams—either material byproducts or waste heat—for additional industrial production. Houston-based Utility Global has successfully begun operation of a system to take superheated gas from a blast furnace to produce hydrogen.
According to the company, the system—called H2Gen—uses a single-step process under the steel plants normal operating conditions.
According to a press statement in March, the system has been in operation for more than 3,000 hours, and has been able to restart within 15 minutes after an interruption to the flow of feed gas from the furnace.
The system relies on hot carbon monoxide (CO) from the blast furnace as well as a stream of steam. Two electrodes and an electrolyte separate the two streams, and the barrier pulls oxygen atoms away from the water molecules and transfers them to the CO, resulting in relatively pure streams of hydrogen and carbon dioxide.
In addition to steelmaking, the company believes the system could find use in such industries as chemicals, refining, power, and upstream oil and gas.
DIAMOND COAT FOR SINGLE-PATIENT DENTAL TOOLS
Dentists now recognize the potential for passing pathogens from patient to patient, so disposable, single-use dental tools are important. But what these tools gain in disposability, they often give up in durability. Often, a tool wears out before a procedure is completed, and the dentist must pause to replace it.
Abrasive Technology, headquarter in Lewis Center, Ohio, recently introduced a new line of disposable burs for the dental market, taking advantage of a new manufacturing process that enabled the placement of the diamond cutting grit into a precise pattern. The goal, the company said, was to produce a tool that could cut quickly but with reduced noise and vibration.
The manufacturing process was flexible enough to firmly affix the diamond chips to more than 20 different tool shapes.
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