Advanced Materials

Trucking is a big business. In the US, trucking industry revenues are in excess of $726bn. No wonder then that autonomous trucking is a hot topic.

Cast your mind back a few years and you will find a conductive ink business that appeared very mature and slow moving. Then everything began to change...

While grid load from electric vehicles is expected to rise in the near future. Engineers are already looking for solutions to make electric vehicles function independently of the grid.

Robotic technology will transform the forklift industry, causing a colossal transfer of value from human-provided driving services, towards spending on autonomous industrial material handling machines, thus fuelling an industry revenue boom far exceeding recent growth trends.

Last mile delivery remains an expensive affair in the parcel delivery business, often representing more than half of the total cost. Its importance is also growing thanks to a change in the composition of total deliveries with B2C deliveries rapidly taking on a bigger share.

Cast you mind back a few years and you will find a conductive ink business that appeared very mature and slow moving. The boom years of the photovoltaic industry were ending, the dominant big suppliers seem well entrenched, and the technology was, at best, only incrementally improving, with new technologies such as nanoparticle inks failing to get traction. Then everything began to change.

Ceramic Metal Composites (CMC) and Metal Matrix Composites (MMC) are not new concepts, but they have never reached their potential.

Let us be more ambitious and look at elimination of all energy storage.

Robots are becoming uncaged, mobile, collaborative and increasingly intelligent and dexterous, moving beyond their traditional strongholds to bring automation to previously inaccessible tasks.

Nearly all the advocates of fibre reinforced polymers (FRP) shy away from talking about the many elephants in the room and there are enough of them that is beyond crowded.