by Gary Mintchell | May 28, 2021 | Business, Capital Projects, Technology
One of this week’s more intriguing conversations centered on solar power from your canopy, awning, or tent with Pvilion CEO Colin Touhey.
Maybe in these post-Covid days of rediscovered al fresco dining, you may be able to have a fine meal under a tent with lighting and outlets to charge your mobile device powered by solar cells in the fabric of the tent. Or perhaps thinking of work, you need temporary coverage of an area for work or storage. And electrical power is required. Maybe many volts and amps. Same scenario. Pvilion products, er, cover a fascinating range of use cases. I’ve included a general background of Pvilion and its technology plus use cases from the New York Botanical Garden and a Home Depot location.
What is Pvilion?
(from an essay by Director of Marketing Jill Gettinger) Pvilion integrates solar cells into fabric, producing products that when exposed to the sun, generate electricity. Pvilion can take any surface that receives sunlight, cover it with this fabric and produce electricity, providing flexible structures that can be powered independent from the electricity grid.
The more technical name for Pvilion’s offerings is flexible photovoltaic (PV) solar fabric products and structures and behind the simplicity is a 10-year-old partnership between Colin Touhey, an electrical engineer and CEO of Pvilion, and fabric industry veterans Todd Dalland, a pioneering designer and inventor in the field of lightweight structures, and Robert Lerner, AIA, an architect who has led new technology development programs involving lightweight, deployable structures for NASA, the U.S. Army and the U.S. Air Force. The three connected when they were working on integrating photovoltaic cells with fabric for the U.S. Department of Defense.
Pvilion’s roots go back more than 20 years when Dalland and Lerner developed the first photovoltaic tent. That the tent was easy to deploy, flexible and self-powered piqued the attention of the military, which led to research and development funding from the U.S. Army.
Military deployments during this time further increased product demand as forward operating bases needed to be setup quickly in places where there was no grid, and it was difficult to setup up traditional power generators.
At the same time, mobile device usage, cell phones, laptops, handheld computers, was taking off. The mobile purpose of these devices meant they often needed to be powered where access to a traditional grid source was not available. To meet this need, Pvilion developed the Solar Sail, a small solar canopy that resembles a sail, hence the name, which can be easily deployed in public spaces and at outdoor gatherings, e.g., sporting events, concerts, parks, weddings,et cetera. Once deployed and receiving sun light, it generates power that can be tapped into to charge mobile devices.
Concern for the environment also came into play as solar power’s proven advantage over fossil fuels is that its use leaves no carbon footprint. As a result, environmentally conscious corporations and public entities, like schools, began installing Pvilion’s solar power canopy structures to meet both short- and long-term needs while avoiding the costs, environmental damage, and time associated with erecting and running permanent structures tied into the local power grid.
What started out as a solar powered tent has evolved into a product range covering standalone USB charging stations and easy to erect temporary structures, including canopies and awnings, all solar powered.
The easiest way to understand what Pvilion does is to look at one of its signature products: The Solar Sail Canopy, a free-standing canopy that can be erected anywhere that receives sunlight: parks, university campuses, bus stands or in any public setting, and used to recharge mobile devices. The Solar Sail Canopy is available in (3) versions: a Single Pole Solar Sail, a Double Pole Solar Sail that can be used as a solar powered shelter, e.g., over a bus stop or bench, and a portable Four Pole Canopy for seasonal applications that can be customized to suit an individual space requirement.
Sustainability At New York Botanical Garden
Aesthetic appeal is very important to The New York Botanical Garden (NYBG), which is why the NYC Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS) chose NYBG as the launch site for Pvilion’s Solar Powered Canopy structures.
Intended to provide NYBG visitors a place where they can seek shade, enjoy a beverage and recharge their mobile devices, the eight (8) solar canopies, designed, engineered and installed by Pvilion, provide ample space to relax while staying safely socially distanced.
Pvilion provides a fabric that incorporates photovoltaic cells, which generate electricity upon exposure to the sun. As part of New York City’s emission reduction efforts, seven (7) of the canopies contribute energy directly to the city’s power grid. One (1) structure powers a bank of batteries used by NYBG and by Botanical Garden visitors to charge their mobile phones and other cellular devices.
The solar canopies are a pilot project operated by Pvilion and the Innovative Demonstrations for Energy Adaptability (IDEA) Program, an initiative of the City of New York’s Division of Energy Management. The program encourages businesses, innovators and entrepreneurs to create transformative opportunities and to foster a culture of innovation. The goal is to find solutions to the challenges facing manufacturers and businesses through partnerships with private sector business entities, with emphasis placed on technology to help the City reduce carbon emissions.
Pvilion’s Solar-Powered Fabric Products are fully turn-key solutions that provide energy in any location where fabric is exposed to the sun. Pvilion integrates its fabric technology into a wide range of applications. The technology eliminates the need of having two (2) separate systems: fabric shade/shelter and solar panels. Instead, Pvilion integrates the solar power into its fabric to achieve one turn-key product that provides charging, lighting, ventilation, climate control all in an easy to install manner. Pvilion has delivered high quality products for customers like Google, Tommy Hilfiger, Carnegie Hall, Tishman, New York City, Yale Univ, the Florida Dept of Transportation, Bloomberg, The City of Miami, FL and more.
Home Depot Pilot Program to Achieve Sustainable Energy
The Home Depot Rental Center in Geismar, Louisiana, a large industrial building and parking area, serves as the rental equipment preparation and distribution center to surrounding Home Depot stores. Here, equipment is prepared before being sent to Home Depot Superstores upon being rented by customers. The first of over one hundred rental centers planned to be opened throughout the country, Geismar is also the initial location for a Home Depot green pilot energy sustainability program in which Pvilion Solar Canopies will be used to recharge rental equipment batteries.
Pvilion developed and installed its signature product, the Portable Solar Sail Tent, at the Geismar, LA Home Depot. Effectively, a relocatable canopy integrated with solar panels; the Solar Sail can provide sustainable power anywhere that receives sunlight. It lets Home Depot charge its electric rental equipment independently from the local electric grid, eliminating the environmental impact associated with traditional sources of energy and the need to create permanent infrastructure.
The implemented 20 ft x 24 ft structure provides two (2) bays under an angled roof for maximum sun exposure. It is designed to withstand extreme weather conditions yet is flexible for speedy assembly/disassembly. It can provide up to 5 kW of energy and storage for up to five (5) full operational days of energy without sun. In addition to charging rental equipment, the energy provided by the Solar Sail can also be used to power other devices such as cell phones, laptops and lighting.
by Gary Mintchell | May 27, 2021 | Operations Management, Technology, Workforce
Augmented Reality. Some of these days, I feel as if I’m living in an alternate reality. I’m attending two company conferences, about to go lift weights, practice some on the guitar, and never leave the house. The joy of virtual conferences is that I don’t have to choose between Las Vegas and Boston to attend a conference this week (like that would be hard…). Shifting mental gears quickly helps keep me young.
One of the conferences was Vuforia Live. This is a PTC acquisition putting the company into the AR race. Given the PLM original side of the business linked with the ThingWorx IoT side of the business plus the Rockwell Automation partnership, this combination should lead to some innovative and useful solutions for customers.
PTC President and CEO Jim Heppelmann led off the event talking about his enthusiasm for the potential of AR calling it IoT for humans. Why AR? Because humans don’t come with an Ethernet port. Seriously, he sees AR as empowering frontline workers.
In short:
I think workflow enhancement is a key digital benefit—if done thoughtfully and intelligently as Cal Newport has detailed in his new book, A World Without Email. The new product out from Vuforia, Instruct, can be such a key tool.
- New Offering from PTC’s Vuforia Enterprise AR Suite Empowers Front-line Workers to Accurately and Efficiently Complete Inspections and Document Relevant Insights in Real Time.
- Vuforia Instruct SaaS Offering Enables OEMs to Simplify and Accelerate Authoring of CAD-Based AR Work Instructions.
This is the news release:
From the stage of the Vuforia Live Virtual Event, PTC announced the release of Vuforia Instruct out-of-the-box offering from the Vuforia Enterprise Augmented Reality (AR) Suite.
With PTC’s Vuforia Instruct, enterprises can leverage 3D CAD data to easily create, deliver, and scale interactive AR work instructions
The Software as a Service (SaaS)-based offering, available on the PTC Atlas platform, empowers original equipment manufacturers to extend the value of the digital thread all the way to their front-line workers. With Vuforia Instruct, enterprises can leverage 3D CAD data to easily create, deliver, and scale interactive AR work instructions, enabling them to optimize inspections for Quality and Field Maintenance use cases.
“We are thrilled to be working with PTC and Rockwell Automation to bring AR to our customers and see tremendous opportunity to use 3D work instructions to address critical inspection steps within our maintenance, repair, and sanitation processes on our packaging equipment,” said Alexander Ouellet, Innovation Engineer, Harpak-ULMA Packaging. “The enhanced work instructions created with Vuforia Instruct enable us to upskill our customers’ employees, and even our own technical staff, on intricate procedures in mission critical environments. AR technologies will help our customers reap significant productivity gains by enabling them to improve the accuracy and timeliness of complex, manual processes.”
Approximately 67% of manufacturers are still utilizing manual paper processes for inspections. These existing methods are often error-filled, difficult to transcribe, and costly – ultimately becoming barriers to continuous improvement. Such inefficiencies can result in poor product quality or experiences, cost millions of dollars per year, and lead to loss of brand reputation, market position, customer satisfaction, and revenue. Vuforia Instruct enables companies to eliminate reliance on paper forms by delivering contextual visual guidance and references to front-line workers with built-in, real-time inspection feedback to capture critical insights.
“Vuforia Instruct enables organizations to transform the way they create and scale work instructions to their front-line employees,” said Michael Campbell, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Augmented Reality Products, PTC. “Leveraging existing 3D CAD data, organizations can now guide employees to exactly where work needs to be done and provide them with detailed instructions for critical inspection procedures in context. Such enhancements are critical to industrial organizations looking to increase productivity, improve quality, and reduce unplanned downtime.”
by Gary Mintchell | May 27, 2021 | Podcast, Productivity
Show notes: Get outside. Get outside into nature, a park or something, to refresh your mind and body. Get outside your preconceived ideas and prejudices for better thinking. Mary Donelan came to KMC Systems to use Lean to improve productivity. She had to overcome existing prejudices that improvements meant reducing workforce. She exemplified the basic Lean principle of Respect for People leading personal growth along with improving productivity allowing the company to take on more work. Then I wondered about adding software and knowledge workers and any impact on productivity. This leads to considering Cal Newport’s new book A World Without Email and a look at improving knowledge worker workflow. Finally, a challenge to Americans about adopting standards and productivity-enhancing methods. Thanks to long-time sponsor Inductive Automation.
by Gary Mintchell | May 26, 2021 | Data Management, Manufacturing IT, Operations Management
The Industrial Internet of Things along with other manufacturing IT advances led to a rise in unstructured data causing storage challenges increasing the importance of data mobility. Continuing my theme today of data, this is news from a company new to me called Datadobi, which touts itself as a global leader in unstructured data migration software.
It released a report earlier this month by 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, which reveals the major impact that data growth is having on storage management, highlighting the rise in retention of unstructured data exacerbating the storage challenges faced by organizations. The report, which was commissioned from 451 Research features data from 451 Research’sVoice of the Enterprise: Storage, Data Management & Disaster Recovery 2021survey, underscores the need for businesses to plan for the disposition of ageing data, implement migration and protection plans, and understand storage-consumption costs if they are to effectively manage data, whether on-premises and in the cloud.
The report identifies data growth as the number one storage management challenge in most organizations, ahead of a range of issues such as disaster recovery requirements, cost, and migration. In addition, respondents said they expect their data management to grow by 26% over the next 12 months.
The growth in unstructured data is also complicating the approach organizations need to take to disaster recovery and data protection. As the report points out, this is “forcing them to look beyond traditional on-premises storage infrastructure to leverage public cloud storage or managed services to help reduce the burden on the IT staff. Hybrid IT.” This means that organizations will need to manage growing levels of unstructured data, both on-premises and in the cloud. As a result, companies will require cross-platform data migration (data mobility), protection, and management that are rooted in clear and identifiable ownership. (Business Impact Brief by 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence)
To address these challenges, the report says: “Organizations should seek out tools and platforms that allow them to leverage a wide array of vendor and cloud offerings to preserve choice while also preserving the ability to negotiate lower prices and superior service levels from their vendors. The ability to provide deeper insight into how data is being used is invaluable given the price disparity between high performance storage tiers and low-cost archive tiers.”
Commenting on the report, Michael Jack, Datadobi CRO, said: “Data growth continues to be a top challenge in most organizations. As cloud adoption continues, efficient data mobility takes on new importance and must be automated as much as possible. Retention policies, data protection policies, and data disposition policies need to be clearly defined through partnerships between business data owners and the infrastructure owners who provide storage services to the business.”
Jack continued: “By delivering enterprise-class NAS migration software to migrate and protect data anywhere, Datadobi helps customers around the world address these challenges and remain in control of their storage management strategy.”
Download a full copy of the report.t
by Gary Mintchell | May 26, 2021 | Data Management, Manufacturing IT, Operations Management
This week’s virtual conference is Hitachi Vantara Social Innovation. I watched a few sessions yesterday. I’ll be back today for a little more between household chores and an interview. The key takeaway is data-driven. Showcased were the Disney Company and American Heart Association with executives discussing the business value of successfully employing a data-driven culture with Hitachi Vantara infrastructure.
I have been sitting on this press release for three weeks because I actually had a huge backlog of news. It begins by touting its position as Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Industrial IoT Platforms. It is in great company with PTC and Microsoft.
Highlights of the news include:
- Lumada Manufacturing Insights: The industry-specific solution integrates data from multiple sources – from vibration, video, lidar and audio – to detect disturbances in the supply chain and allows for greater visibility and planning.
- Smart Spaces & Lumada Video Insights: With improved team collaboration and incident response, these solutions use data sourced from trains, first responder vehicles and factories, among others, to improve quality and safety in the human-machine interaction.
- Lumada Edge Intelligence: Faster than ever before, made possible by an integration with Google Cloud, this solution accelerates data preparation and ML workflows for automated decision-making and more time to focus on the value of insights.
Hitachi Vantara, the digital infrastructure, data management, and digital solutions subsidiary of Hitachi announced advancements to the Lumada software platform and industry solutions to accelerate the digital transformation of industrial processes.
Improving manufacturing operational outcomes involves comprehensive data analysis and integration from thousands of moving parts across remote and industrial environments. Lumada is Hitachi’s digital platform that connects data, assets, and people to fuel industry innovation. It is the software foundation for Lumada Industry Solutions, that extract data-driven insight and drive better operational and business outcomes. The updated Lumada portfolio allows customers to automate tasks and make faster decisions by training data models in the cloud and deploying them to edge devices, creating actionable insights from diverse data sets at lower infrastructure cost.
“Across the globe, industries are dealing with increasing complexity, a faster changing environment and greater competition that together are driving a need for accelerated digitalization. Supply chain disruptions, health and safety measures and operational challenges have highlighted this need for data-driven innovation,” said, Radhika Krishnan, Chief Product Officer, Hitachi Vantara. “Today’s advancements allow our customers to make faster, more informed decisions so industries can thrive in our rapidly digitalizing future.”
Delivering Deeper Insights and Faster Time to Value
Hitachi Vantara is accelerating industrial digitalization with major enhancements to data-driven offerings for manufacturing, extending AI and automation from edge to core, and delivering deep real-time insights from new combinations of data and connections.
Lumada Manufacturing Insights:
- This industry solution delivers greater visibility across a customers’ supply chain subsystems with the supply chain module’s ability to implement supply chain control tower solutions and take direct, demand-driven action.
- Integrating and correlating data from multiple sources– from asset health data to vibration, video, lidar and audio – to detect potential failure of a machine, manufacturers can better predict points of failure and perform preventive maintenance, reducing downtime and improving output.
- Also new is the ability to automate forms for digitization of factory floor processes – a practice that is still largely done with pen, paper and spreadsheets – to establish ‘if this, then that’ protocols across manufacturing processes.
- Lumada Manufacturing Insights is now also available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace for easier integration with Microsoft cloud environments.
Smart Spaces & Lumada Video Insights:
- These industry solutions leverage new workflow automation within Hitachi Visualization Suite and a mobile application for improved team collaboration and incident response.
- An expanded Hitachi Edge Gateway portfolio includes industry-tailored and “ruggedized” versions that allow for data integration from sources such as trains, industrial spaces, or first responder vehicles and equipment, and includes higher compute power at the edge with CPU or GPU options to enable new outcomes, and make faster, more data-driven decisions.
- Sensor fusion creates the ability to co-analyze video, lidar, and other data to enable new use cases such as quality assurance and analysis of human-machine interaction, while improving accuracy.
Lumada Edge Intelligence:
- Integration between the Lumada software platform and Google Cloud allows customers to speedup data preparation by adjusting resources on-demand and combining multiple data types for better insights.
- Updates to Lumada Edge Intelligence also simplify Machine Learning workflows by pushing models to edge devices for faster automated decision-making without reliance on point tools.
- New APIs for edge management and data access allow reuse of assets, gateways, and software to create integrated solutions utilizing existing infrastructure.
“Meat & Livestock Australia has been collaborating with Hitachi Vantara on a number of digital projects over the past five years leading up to our latest project, the Connected Beef Supply Chain Control Tower,” says Dr. Nigel Tomkins, program manager, grassfed productivity at Meat & Livestock Australia. “Hitachi Vantara’s Lumada Manufacturing Insights has allowed our industry to integrate both sensor and system data to provide insights across the supply chain—this has led to improved productivity and quality outcomes. We look forward to leveraging the capabilities of the Supply Chain Control Tower even further—gaining insight on factors impacting supply and consumer demand.”
“Our industry is experiencing rapid digitalization and a distinct increase in the pace of business. This underscores the need for more agility and predictability in everything we do and what we deliver to our customers,” Petra Sundström, VP & Head of Digital Offering, Sandvik Rock Processing at industrial manufacturer Sandvik. “We’re collaborating with Hitachi to innovate our business models. With Lumada Manufacturing Insights, we are now able to offer predictive maintenance as a service–delivering the outcomes our customers are looking for in this digital era.”
“For manufacturers to get real end-to-end benefits from data-driven solutions, it’s important to focus not only on the obvious areas of production. Other data sources and solutions beyond the factory floor should also be looked at. For example, use video analytics to study material flow from receiving dock to warehouse to shop floor; use lidar to monitor employee movements from a safety perspective. There are so many ways to use this technology, and the applications become more apparent as the team familiarizes with the sensors and analytics,” says Allen Ahlert, senior director, Engineering with Hitachi Computer Products (America), Inc. which leverages Lumada solutions at its 352,000 sq. ft manufacturing and supply facility in Norman, OK. “Hitachi Vantara has been able to approach this holistically beyond what point solutions can do to create comprehensive, rich insights across facilities and processes.”
