Highlights this week: A new record fiber data rate 📈 the rise of the US steel industry 🏭 Finland’s mega-cavern 🪨
📝 Featured Article: AllSpice wrote a great article breaking down the difference between HTTPS and SSH communication in ECAD applications.
🎙️ Featured Interview: Read our interview with Elie Rosen of BLT.
Interesting Links 🏭
Vantaan Energia, a publicly owned Finnish utility company, is constructing the world’s largest hot water storage cavern near Helsinki. The cavern will be used to store up to 90GWh of heat energy in a 20x30x100m structure at a peak depth of 100m underground. The operating principle of the seasonal thermal energy storage is to store heat in underground caverns so that it can be used to heat buildings via the district heating network whenever it is needed. The water will be pressurized to 140 degrees (without boiling or evaporating) and then distributed throughout Helsinki.
Researchers at Aston University in the United Kingdom have achieved a world record data transmission rate of 301TB/s through a fiber optic cable, 4.5 million times faster than the average home broadband. Researchers achieved this record by designing new optical amplifiers and gain equalizers which can make use of the E and S bands not previously used in standard fiber optic systems, in conjunction with the C and L- bands historically used to serve customer demand.
In this issue of The Bridge, the media outlet for the National Academy of Engineering, guest editors Greg Olson and Aziz Asphahani have assembled feature articles that demonstrate how computational materials science and engineering is leading the way in the deployment of metallic materials that meet increasingly advanced design specifications. The Rise of the US Steel Industry (page 9) is a particularly interesting read. Ric Fulop, founder of Desktop Metal, endorsed the article by tweeting “If you make hardware products and you want to improve your processes please read this”.
NASA has finally diagnosed the issues that caused the Voyager 1 satellite to stop working. Approximately 3% of the system's memory became corrupted. Whether this was caused by a high energy bit flip, or a component failure after 50+ years of spaceflight, the exact reasons are unknown. Regardless, NASA is hopeful that it can patch voyager to work around the corrupted memory and continue the mission.
A video presentation of a recent IEEE paper demonstrating a system capable of wirelessly charging a drone from high voltage power lines. The drone can autonomously detect the power line, navigate to it, hang from the powerline (without hovering) using a special gripper, and start charging by regulating the powerline’s magnetic field. Interestingly, the gripper is an electromagnet which is also powered by the transmission line. This scheme allows the drone to continuously cycle between flying, landing, recharging, and takeoff, enabling extended, essentially unlimited, operational endurance. Full paper here.
Another video from Prof Sam Ben-Yaakov discussing DC regulation of PWM converters. Looking at a typical negative feedback control loop for a PWM voltage regulator Sam investigates how to improve PWM control if there is a step change in the input voltage or load current. Two key factors affect how a system responds to step input change: A high loop gain helps the system to quickly compensate for changes and restore the output quickly. A feedforward control loop can reduce output disturbance by anticipating changes ahead of the load.
This new plugin on GitHub which allows you to render a KiCAD design in Blender with incredible results. The pcb2blender workflow lets you create professionally looking product renders of all your KiCad projects in minutes! It lets you focus all your time on actually composing and lighting an interesting scene, skipping all the boring cleanup work that would be required without it.
Startup News 🚀💰:
Circuit Mind publicly unveils ACE: the world’s first deterministic AI that lets electronics teams go from architecture to schematic in 60 seconds, so that they can get to market faster, avoid respins, and create smaller, cheaper, more power-efficient products.
XPANCEO, an AR smart eye contact lens company who raised a $40M Seed round last year, had its pitch deck broken down by TechCrunch this week.
Fox Robotics, who have raised a cumulative $40M in funding since their latest Series A extension signed a partnership agreement with WalMart to deploy their robotic forklifts in the company’s distribution centers.
Proxima Fusion, the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics spin-out, raised a $21.3M Seed round to commercialize research conducted at the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator in Greifswald, Germany.
Sierra Space completed a beta test for its new payload delivery system which can transport cargo anywhere in the world within 90 minutes. Sierra Space last raised during a $230M Series B in Fall 2023.
Sima.ai raised a $70M Series C led by Maverick Capital, Point72, Jericho, Amplify Partners, Lip-Bu Tan, and others participating. The company is developing an ML specialized SoC design for AI computing applications at the edge.
General aviation flights in the United States increased by more than 116% on April 8th during the total solar eclipse
