#remote machine monitoring

Original equipment manufacturers or machine builders often face issues in addressing the service requirements of machines. Be it normal maintenance or equipment failure, service requirements should be addressed properly. In the past, failure in equipment resulted in a delayed order, scrapped parts, and potential cases of machine downtime. As technology continues to get smarter, production facilities become more capable to oversee equipment’s performance and keep track of scheduled maintenance through remote monitoring.

Rise of Remote Machine Monitoring

Traditionally, machine monitoring requires a costly and lengthy on-site visit and in-depth investigation into problems. However, with remote asset monitoring solution, it becomes easier for OEMs to troubleshoot even a single alteration in a tool’s path. Moreover, remote monitoring equips OEMs to review data, detect variations or patterns, and service machines on time.

Also Read : Top Ways IoT Asset Management Solution Benefits Automobile Industry

Major Benefits of Remote Monitoring

1. Enhanced Security

2. Reduced Downtime

3. Decreased Ownership Costs

Concluding Lines

Rejig digital is a leading digital transformation solutions provider that allows you to leverage the potential of remote monitoring in manufacturing. We offer future-ready IoT solutions for streamlining operations to different industry verticals. Want to know more about our solutions? Just drop us a line at [email protected] with your requirements, and we will get back to you soon with the solution that can best suit your requirements.

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In a newly published study, researchers detail the discovery of a new photocatalyst, demonstrating the use of cobalt oxide nanoparticles to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.

Researchers from the University of Houston have found a catalyst that can quickly generate hydrogen from water using sunlight, potentially creating a clean and renewable source of energy.

Their research, published online Sunday in Nature Nanotechnology, involved the use of cobalt oxide nanoparticles to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.

Jiming Bao, lead author of the paper and an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UH, said the research discovered a new photocatalyst and demonstrated the potential of nanotechnology in engineering a material’s property, although more work remains to be done.

Bao said photocatalytic water-splitting experiments have been tried since the 1970s, but this was the first to use cobalt oxide and the first to use neutral water under visible light at a high energy conversion efficiency without co-catalysts or sacrificial chemicals. The project involved researchers from UH, along with those from Sam Houston State University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Texas State University, Carl Zeiss Microscopy LLC, and Sichuan University.

Researchers prepared the nanoparticles in two ways, using femtosecond laser ablation and through mechanical ball milling. Despite some differences, Bao said both worked equally well.

Different sources of light were used, ranging from a laser to white light simulating the solar spectrum. He said he would expect the reaction to work equally well using natural sunlight.

Once the nanoparticles are added and light applied, the water separates into hydrogen and oxygen almost immediately, producing twice as much hydrogen as oxygen, as expected from the 2:1 hydrogen to oxygen ratio in H2O remote monitoring   water molecules, Bao said.

The experiment has potential as a source of renewable fuel, but at a solar-to-hydrogen  Industrial IoT Router/Gateway  efficiency rate of around 5 percent, the conversion rate is still too low to be commercially viable. Bao suggested a more feasible efficiency rate would be about 10 percent, meaning that 10 percent of the incident solar energy will be converted to hydrogen chemical energy by the process.

Other issues remain to be resolved, as well, including reducing costs and extending the lifespan of cobalt oxide nanoparticles, which the researchers found became deactivated after about an hour of reaction.

“It degrades too quickly,” said Bao, who also has appointments in materials engineering and the Department of Chemistry.

The work, supported by the Wel distribution automation  ch Foundation, will lead to future research, he said, including the question of why cobalt oxide nanoparticles have such a short lifespan, and questions involving chemical and electronic properties of the material.

Publication: Longb Liao, et al., “Efficient solar water-splitting using a nanocrystalline CoO photocatalyst,” Nature Nanotechnology, 2013; doi:10.1038/nnano.2013.272

Image: Bubbles Rise in Water from Shutterstock

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Elemental mapping of the location of iron atoms (blue) in the magnetic nanoparticles and cadmium (red) in the fluorescent quantum dots provide a clear visualization of the way the two kinds of particles naturally separate themselves into a core-and-shell structure.

A team of researchers has developed particles that can glow with color-coded light and be manipulated with magnets, improving the likelihood of tracking the position of the nanoparticles as they move within the body or inside a cell.

A long-sought goal of creating particles that can emit a colorful fluorescent glow in a biological environment, and that could be precisely manipulated into position within living cells, has been achieved by a team of researchers at MIT and several other institutions. The finding is reported this week in the journal Nature Communications.

The new technology could make it possible to track the position of the nanoparticles as they move within the body or inside a cell. At the same time, the nanoparticles could be manipulated precisely by applying a magn 3g router etic field to pull them along. And finally, the particles could have a coating of a bioreactive substance that could seek out and bind with particular molecules within the body, such as markers for tumor cells or other disease agents.

“It’s been a dream of mine for many years to have a nanomaterial that incorporates both fluorescence and magnetism in a single compact object,” says Moungi Bawendi, the Lester Wolfe Professor of Chemistry at MIT and senior author of the new paper. While other groups have achieved some combination of these two properties, Bawendi says that he “was never very satisfied” with results previously achieved by his own team or others.

For one thing, he says, such particles have been too large to make practical probes of living tissue: “They’ve tended to have a lot of wasted volume,” Bawendi says. “Compactness is critical for biological and a lot of other applications.”

In addition, previous efforts were unable to produce particles of uniform and predictable size, which could also be an essential property for diagnostic or therapeutic applications.

Moreover, Bawendi says, “We wanted to be able to manipulate these structures inside the cells with magnetic fields, but also know exactly what it is we’re moving.” All of these goals are achieved by the new nanoparticles, which can be identified with great precision by the wavelength of their fluorescent emissions.

The new method produces the combination of desired properties “in as small a package as possible,” Bawendi says — which could help pave the way for particles with other useful properties, such as the ability to bind with a specific type of bioreceptor, or another molecule of interest.

In the technique developed by Bawend cloud platform  i’s team, led by lead author and postdoc Ou Chen, the nanoparticles crystallize such that they self-assemble in exactly the way that leads to the most useful outcome: The magnetic particles cluster at the center, while fluorescent particles form a uniform coating around them. That puts the fluorescent molecules in the most visible location for allowing the nanoparticles to be tracked optically through a microscope.

“These are beautiful structures, they’re so clean,” Bawendi says. That uniformity arises, in part, because the starting material, fluorescent nanoparticles that Bawendi and his group have been perfecting for years, are themselves perfectly uniform in size. “You have to use very uniform material to produce such a uniform construction,” Chen says.

Initially, at least, the particles might be used to probe basic biological functions within cells, Bawendi suggests. As the work continues, later experiments may add additional materials to the particles’ coating so that they interact in specific ways with  Industrial IoT Manufacturer  molecules or structures within the cell, either for diagnosis or treatment.

Watch how supernanoparticles are made to glow and manipulated with magnets inside a cancer cell. Video: Melanie Gonick/MIT

The ability to manipulate the particles with electromagnets is key to using them in biological research, Bawendi explains: The tiny particles could otherwise get lost in the jumble of molecules circulating within a cell. “Without a magnetic ‘handle,’ it’s like a needle in a haystack,” he says. “But with the magnetism, you can find it easily.”

A silica coating on the particles allows additional molecules to attach, causing the particles to bind with specific structures within the cell. “Silica makes it completely flexible; it’s a well developed material that can bind to almost anything,” Bawendi says.

For example, the coating could have a molecule that binds to a specific type of tumor cells; then, “You could use them to enhance the contrast of an MRI, so you could see the spatial macroscopic outlines of a tumor,” he says.

The next step for the team is to test the new nanoparticles in a variety of biological settings. “We’ve made the material,” Chen says. “Now we’ve got to use it, and we’re working with a number of groups around the world for a variety of applications.”

Christopher Murray, a professor of chemistry and materials science and engineering at the University of Pennsylvania who was not connected with this research, says, “This work exemplifies the power of using nanocrystals as building blocks for multiscale and multifunctional structures. We often use the term ‘artificial atoms’ in the community to describe how we are exploiting a new periodic table of fundamental building blocks to design materials, and this is a very elegant example.”

The study included researchers at MIT; Massachusetts General Hospital; Institut Curie in Paris; the Heinrich-Pette Institute and the Bernhard-Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg, Germany; Children’s Hospital Boston; and Cornell University. The work was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Army Research Office through MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, and the Department of Energy.

Publication: Ou Chen, et al., “Magneto-fluorescent core-shell supernanoparticles,” Nature Communications 5, Article number: 5093; doi:10.1038/ncomms6093

Image: Courtesy of the researchers

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Apple Watch 4 is supposed to launch in September 2018, along with the new iPhone X series for the year, and it looks like there will be a major design change on the new variants if one goes by the latest leaks. According to a report in Fast Company Apple Watch is going to get rid of the physical buttons, and instead add solid state buttons, like we saw on the iPhone 7, etc. These will respond to a user’s touch, without o vending computer ne having to physically press the button like on the present Apple Watc 3G 4G LTE h variants.

The report quotes “a source with direct knowledge of Apple’s plans.” To be clear, Apple Watch 4 will continue with button and digital crown, except these will now vibrate when a user touches them. Apple is relying on the same haptic effect like w intelligent substation e saw in the iPhone 7 series onward.

The new buttons could mean a bigger battery as well, considering they will take less space than a physical button, according to the source. It will also make the Apple Watch 4 more water-resistant. According to the report, the new technology is likely to make an appearance with the Apple Watch 4 when it launches in September, though there is a chance the new technology could be pushed to the 2019 variant as well.

These new solid state buttons could collect other data like heart rhythms, according to the Fast Company report, though the heart-rate sensor at the back will continue. Apple could be working on a future variant of the Watch sans any buttons, though this might not happen in 2018.

Read more: Apple Watch 3 LTE full review: This will change your lifestyle, but not everyone needs it

Previously, former Apple analyst Ming Chin-Kuo of KGI Securities had reported that the Apple Watch Series 4 will feature 15 per cent larger display in comparison to Series 3. It was not clear whether Apple will reduce the bezels on the display to allow for a larger screen. It will also come with new sensors for health monitoring, according to Kuo along with a longer battery life.

Kuo had estimated that Apple will ship close to 22-24 million units of Apple Watch in 2018. Apple Watch remains a best-seller from the company and is the top selling smartwatch in the world. Apple Watch shipments stood at 18 million for all of 2017, with nearly 54 per cent growth over the year 2016, according to research firm Canalys. Apple has itself never officially revealed shipment figures for the Watch.

Apple also showcased the new watchOS 5 at its WWDC 2018 conference, with a focus on health-features, new watchfaces, interactive notifications, etc. However, watchOS 5 will not be rolled out to the original Apple Watch.