SurFlow promises to make smart vehicle manufacture simpler and yet much smarter

Nick Booth, freelance IT and communications writer

It’s all to do with electromagnetic waves and plastic, says Nick Booth. One of the most expensive obstacles in creating smart robots and vehicles is the labour-intensive tedium of connecting all the points of intelligence.

That could be removed by a new invention that can send networking signals much faster without using wires or wi-fi. It’s safer on many levels too. Is it too good to be true? That’s for you to find out.

The invention, SurFlow, uses electro-magnetic waves to send signals over substances that had previously resisted networking, such as plastics and composite materials. Office desks, being wood chip and laminate composites, are a perfect medium for conducting the electromagnetic pulses that will carry data packets at 6 Gigabits per second. Yes, 6 Gbps. (I had to check that detail myself), says freelance IT and communications writer, Nick Booth.

This means that Workstation A could talk to Workstation B through the medium of the desk they are both standing on. If they are particularly data intensive machines, they will benefit from conversations that run at up to a thousand times the speed that traditional networking – over copper or wi-fi – could achieve. Better still, the electromagnetic pulses used are unhackable. For now.

The invention is a result of collaboration between Paul Burling at Cambridge-based TWI and Janice Turner at electronics engineering consultancy Roke, who had separately been working on projects using electromagnetic pulses to send data over previously inert materials.

The patent for SurFlow’s technology was granted relatively quickly, within three years as opposed to the seven years it can take to check out all the similar offerings. This is an indication of how outstanding this new technique might be, since there’s nothing like it out there.

What it means for IoT

SurFlow uses surface waves of electromagnetic energy that travel along a material. By incorporating a substrate combining dielectric and conductive materials, these surface waves can be transmitted through composite structures. The waves are propagated and received using transducers which can be placed anywhere along the smart composite.

It’s not the speed or the impregnability of this networking system that will have greatest interest to the Internet of Things (IoT) industry. The fact that networking signals can travel across the very skin of a connected vehicle or robot could have a significant impact.

Take for example, the Avionics industry. When planes are manufactured, they have to include many miles of cabling in the body. Ordinary passenger planes need to be wired up to deliver entertainment to every one of the hundreds of passengers. Then there are all the sensors and transponders and management systems that have to be interconnected.

The transport industry’s next generation of smart trains, boats and planes (not to mention trucks and Teslas and drones) will have far more sophisticated nervous systems. They will be covered in electronic sensors and responders all of which will need networking. Cabling them up would be not only ruinously expensive and time consuming, it would weaken the structure of the vehicles.

If the cabling process introduces any air pockets into the composite material that fills out a plane’s wings, for example, they can make the plane fatally vulnerable. At 35,000 feet, the difference in air pressure will cause those air pockets to expand dramatically.

By sending signals across the fabric of the plane, using SurFlow, these two obstacles can be removed from the manufacturing process. Better still, the signals can be split up, using the same principles multiplexors adopt, to vary the supply of data to different devices on the plane.

For obvious reasons, car and truck makers can enjoy the same safety benefits, and economies of manufacture, from using SurFlow as a basis of construction.

Consumer electronics benefit

The robotics industry would enjoy a massive productivity dividend by cutting all the fiddly cabling jobs. In consumer electronics, the technology would allow a device to instantly connect to a network simply by making contact with the composite’s surface, with no need to plug anything in or detect and connect to a wireless network. And shouldn’t we be using this in the Intelligent Home?

You’ll have to ask TWI, I’m afraid. I’m just the conduit of this intelligence. TWI is the source.

The author of this blog is freelance IT and communications writer, Nick Booth.

Comment on this article below or via Twitter: @IoTNow_ OR @jcIoTnow

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