Fringe Friday: From Mars to Venus with GaN

June 7, 2024 / AEROSPACE HEAT TREAT NEWS

We’re celebrating getting to the “fringe” of the weekend with a Heat Treat Fringe Friday covering news about the promise gallium nitride (GaN) for the future of missions to Venus. Specifically, how this high-temperature-defying material may be used to form semiconductors that won’t melt on the near 900°F surface of Venus.

While not exactly heat treat, “Fringe Friday” deals with interesting developments in one of our key markets: aerospace, automotive, medical, energy, or general manufacturing.

Gallium nitride is a material that researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have been studying how it performs when exposed to high temperatures. They have recently announced that their research has shown successful performance results at 500°C for 48 hours.

The surface of Venus can reach temperatures of up to 480°C. With silicon-based electronics incapable of operating at these high temperatures or a long duration of time, finding a material that can take the heat becomes critical to prospect of sending a rover to the planet’s surface.

John Niroula, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student and lead author of the paper, commented, “Transistors are the heart of most modern electronics, but we didn’t want to jump straight to making a gallium nitride transistor because so much could go wrong. We first wanted to make sure the material and contacts could survive, and figure out how much they change as you increase the temperature. We’ll design our transistor from these basic material building blocks.”

Funding of this research has come from numerous interested parties, including the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Lockheed Martin Corporation, the Semiconductor Research Corporation through the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. Department of Energy, Intel Corporation, and the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology.

Read more about this news here.

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MIT-Backed Startup Tackles Heat Treaters’ High Electricity Bills

June 3, 2024 / BRAZING NEWS, CONTROLS NEWS, MANUFACTURING HEAT TREAT

A group of graduates from MIT and Duke University identified manufacturing as an industry overburdened by rapidly growing energy costs and proposed a technology to provide electric bill savings of up to 30%. They will be piloting this technology with a U.S. heat treater, ThermoFusion, a Californian heat treater and brazer.

EQORE, a startup tackling energy issues for manufacturers, is developing smart energy storage systems. They aim to cut industrial energy bills by a third while offering a payback period of 1–3 years. Connected behind the meter, an EQORE system serves as an optimizing filter for electric equipment without changing its operation in any way. The system consists of a wall-mounted computing unit and a compact floor-mounted battery pack. It can be installed inside or outside of a facility and only needs a connection to the electric panel and internet.

The founding team features backgrounds in energy storage engineering from Tesla and Apple, as well as software and business development, and is supported by an innovation fund at MIT. The technology specifically targets reducing demand charges, which can account for 60–70% of industrial electricity costs. Demand charges penalize high variability in electric usage, a characteristic of heat treating facilities like ThermoFusion. For these facilities, a single peak in power usage can drastically increase the entire bill. Remarkably, in some locations in the U.S., demand rates have doubled since 2022.

After talking to over 200 businesses, utility representatives, and energy experts, the team concluded that the solutions to the demand issue remain limited. Available power optimizations disrupt customer operations, while independent power generation like solar is often out of reach due to its decade-long repayment periods. EQORE’s solution empowers clients to reduce energy costs while maintaining existing production levels.

Their team is actively looking to engage with more pilot customers and is open to collaborations.

The original press release is available upon request.

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Heat Treat Radio #5: Shaymus Hudson of MIT

February 14, 2017 / HEAT TREAT RADIO

Welcome to another episode of Heat Treat Radio, a periodic podcast where Heat Treat Radio host, Doug Glenn, discusses cutting-edge topics with industry-leading personalities. Below, you can either listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or you can read an edited version of the transcript. To see a complete list of other Heat Treat Radio episodes, click here.

Audio: Heat Treat Radio: Shaymus Hudson of MIT

In this conversation, Heat Treat Radio host, Doug Glenn, interviews Shaymus Hudson from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to discuss interesting new developments at MIT as well as his roots and experience in the metals and heat treat industry.

Click the play button below to listen.