Manufacturing in 2026: Less Disruption, More Discipline

Apple’s product experience has always started long before a device is powered on. The box matters, so much so that we probably owe the entire “unboxing” phenomenon to Apple. For decades, the company has treated packaging as an extension of the product itself, engineered to guide the user’s hands, stage the reveal, and convey precision through sound and resistance. Today, that same design discipline has been redirected toward sustainability. The changes here are almost imperceptible, a far cry from the effect of compostable straws replacing plastic ones. Apple’s latest packaging, seen through the eyes of industrial CT, shows how far the company has gone to replace plastic with paper, down to the smallest fold and insert. What the scans show Industrial CT imaging exposes what we normally can’t see: the layered structure that gives this iPhone 17 Pro box its rigidity. Its walls are built from stacked sheets of laminated paperboard, compressed and bonded under heat and pressure. The result is a square, seamless enclosure, its visible surfaces wrapped in a continuous paper layer that conceals every joint. CT cross-sections reveal the layered construction of the iPhone 17 Pro box, made from laminated and stacked paperboard with scored folding corners and a molded fiber tray. Inside sits a molded fiber pulp tray, formed by vacuum suction in a heated aluminum tool. The fibers, drawn from a mix of recycled and virgin sources, are pressed to a density that rivals injection-molded plastic. This tray holds the phone in place and absorbs shock during shipping, performing the same structural role as plastic but with a lower carbon footprint. Industrial CT top-down view showing molded fiber tray and stray paper fiber, evidence of the natural variation in fiber-based materials. Engineered paper, not cardboard What strikes us as simple is the result of several refined paper-engineering techniques. The outer shell’s score lines are cut before lamination, allowing it to fold sharply without cracking. Corners are glued and stacked for thickness, then wrapped by a laminated outer layer that gives the box its continuous surface. In effect, Apple’s packaging combines two crafts: bookbinding and molded pulp forming. The outer box is built like a miniature hardcover book, while the inner tray is the product of advanced fiber-molding technology, similar in principle to an egg carton but executed with the signature finesse of a company with a $4 trillion market cap. A hardcover book, a molded pulp egg carton, and a generic smartphone box show the lineage of Apple’s current fiber-based design. From excess to refinement A decade ago, opening an iPhone box meant peeling away multiple layers of plastic and lifting molded trays holding chargers, cables, and earbuds. The new iPhone 17 Pro box is smaller by nearly half, contains no charger, and is made entirely from fiber-based materials. The difference is more than aesthetic. Apple has replaced every plastic component with laminated paperboard and molded fiber pulp while preserving the magic of unboxing. [Embed video here: Original iPod Classic packaging comparison — showing the size, materials, and inserts of Apple’s early product boxes.] Before Apple’s boxes became fiber sculptures, they were cavernous theaters of plastic and foam. This CT scan of the original iPod box shows how much empty space, weight, and material Apple has since engineered away. The fact that the original iPod packaging is now a collectible shows just how far we’ve come. Marketplaces like StockX use Lumafield industrial CT to verify the authenticity of sealed vintage Apple products, a testament to how packaging has become part of the brand’s cultural and material legacy. The sustainability shift According to Apple’s 2025 Environmental Progress Report, the company is on track to eliminate all plastic from its packaging by the end of 2025. In 2024, products including the iPhone 16, Apple Watch, and MacBook shipped in 100 percent fiber-based boxes. Packaging now consists of roughly 60% recycled fiber, 39% responsibly sourced virgin fiber, and less than 1% plastic. All fiber is either recycled or sourced from forests managed under FSC, PEFC, or Bonsucro standards. Apple’s goal is for every box to be recyclable through mixed-paper streams, the same process (without disassembly or sorting) used for cereal boxes. Apple’s 2025 Environmental Progress Report shows packaging plastic reduced by 20 percentage points since 2015, replaced by recycled and responsibly sourced fiber, part of its goal to eliminate plastic packaging entirely by the end of 2025. The company’s report notes: “Along our journey, we’ve addressed many packaging components that typically rely on plastic, including large product trays, screen films, wraps, and foam cushioning. We’ve replaced each with fiber-based alternatives and implemented innovative alternatives to the small uses of plastics across our packaging — like labels and lamination. At the same time, we’re taking steps to confirm that our packaging is recyclable and that the fiber we source comes from recycled sources or responsibly managed forests.” (Apple Environmental Progress Report 2025, p. 21) Engineering at scale Transitioning to fiber packaging is far more complex than replacing one material with another. Paper behaves differently than plastic; it absorbs moisture, expands unevenly, and varies in thickness. To preserve the precise fit and slow-release “air cushion” feel of an iPhone box, Apple reengineered its production tools and quality-control systems to manage those variations. That transformation extends across its global supply chain: more than 70 packaging vendors have joined Apple’s redesign program, with 90 percent expected to complete the fiber transition by mid-2025. Apple’s work also reflects a larger movement reshaping electronics packaging. Google committed to plastic-free designs for Pixel, Nest, and Fitbit by 2023, Samsung pledged a full switch to recycled paper packaging for the Galaxy S24, and Xiaomi (the so-called “Apple of China”) began cutting plastics from its boxes in 2020. Yet Apple’s influence is unmatched. When it standardizes a solution, the industry tends to follow. This path builds on groundwork laid by Dell more than a decade ago, when they began experimenting with bamboo, mushroom-based foams, and molded pulp. “Almost every person on this planet of eight billion people touches packaging multiple times a day,” said Dell’s Director of Procurement & Packaging Engineering Oliver Campbell in a 2023 interview with Forbes. “If you’re anything like me, you wake up, stagger to the shower, and it’s packaging—everything.” That omnipresence is what makes even small changes in the CPG space have massive consequences. The material frontier Material science is continually expanding what fiber packaging can do. By blending virgin wood fibers with bamboo, agricultural waste, or recycled pulp, engineers can fine-tune stiffness, texture, and strength. Today, some of these composites can match the polish of plastic while remaining fully recyclable. For Apple, that progress is both technical and symbolic. The box that once defined the company’s design precision now speaks to its environmental commitments too, proof that sustainability has become part of the product itself.

The Quality Gap

Behind the Battery Report

Behind the Battery Report Today, we released Lumafield’s Battery Quality Report, an investigation into the hazards that hide inside the lithium-ion battery supply chain. For this study, I CT-scanned 1,054 cylindrical 18650 cells from ten different brands, spanning the gamut from reputable, well-known battery manufacturers to ultra-discounted cells from Temu and several sources in-between. As battery users, we all intuitively expect alternative-brand cells to be lower quality, but it’s easy to gloss over how much worse they may really be, especially when a cheaper look-alike promises the same or better specs, and the name brands feel overpriced. However, our CT scans revealed much bigger quality gaps than I could’ve imagined, and once we factored in how dangerous a bad battery can be, the story turned from curious to genuinely concerning. Diving into battery quality questions As a Technical Product Marketing Manager at Lumafield, I design experiments to test and show how engineers can leverage CT to solve real problems. I’m constantly looking for areas to double-click on, and as a gadget-lover, batteries are all-too-often on my mind. A few months ago, I wrote a blog post about the Anker A1263 power bank recall, and it achieved a surprising level of virality given the relatively unglamorous product it covered. But perhaps the practical pervasiveness of batteries in all of our daily lives is exactly what drove so much interest in the piece. In that article, I scanned five power banks: enough to make a few concrete observations, but a tiny sample against the realities of production scale. I wanted the insights that could come with a larger dataset, and 18650 cells seemed like the obvious choice. 18650s are standardized battery cells, their name reflecting that they measure 18 mm in diameter and 65 mm long. These cells are absolutely everywhere. Over five billion are produced each year, and they can be found in everything from electric toothbrushes and cordless drills to even some electric vehicles. For example, each of the Anker power banks I scanned contained 3 18650s, and my colleague’s e-bike battery contained a whopping 39. Though the majority of 18650s are assembled into packs of multiple cells and deeply integrated into devices, there are a few applications where the cells are user-replaceable, such as vapes or flashlights, making them relatively easy to procure. Study methodology I ordered at least 100 cells from each of 10 brands, ending up with 1,054 cells total, given purchase increment minimums and free extras received. Every cell was scanned. Three sets came from the well-known OEMs—Murata, Samsung, and Panasonic—sourced from reputable online stores specializing in 18650 batteries. Three sets came from the rewrap brands Efest, Vapcell, and Trustfire, with Efest and Vapcell coming from reputable 18650 online storefronts, and the Trustfire cells coming from their brand website. The final four were more suspicious. I chose three of the brands for being lower cost: Treasurecase and Maxiaeon came from Temu, Benkia from Amazon. The SOOCOOL cells were not cheap, but were advertised on Amazon as “authentic” Samsung 30Q cells, their wraps closely but not perfectly mimicking the aesthetic of the genuine Samsung cells. A counterfeit SOOCOOL “Authentic 30QP” next to an OEM Samsung 30Q cell. Table of cells scanned for the experiment. Every battery was labeled on arrival for traceability, then scanned as received. We scanned on a Lumafield industrial CT system with a 130 kV microfocus source. Using Ultra-Fast CT, we scanned each cell in under a minute, then processed the data with our Battery Analysis Module, which automatically finds electrode edges and extracts study metrics in bulk. Lumafield has two industrial CT product lines: Neptune, a compact and easy-to-install solution ideal for R&D offices and labs, and Triton, optimized for high-volume environments. We built the workflow to reflect production realities, because annual battery output is enormous and speed determines practical value. In production, Triton paired with Ultra-Fast CT can scan cylindrical cells in under five seconds, enabling more than 720 cells per hour and making battery inspection feasible at scale. To support what we saw in the CT scans, I added a few supplementary tests. I measured capacity on one sample from each set. Marketing claims as high as 9,900 mAh appeared on some of the cell listings, a number that far exceeds what this format can deliver, and the measurements confirmed the mismatch. We also ran longer scans on a handful of cells to resolve more fine details and validate the automated measurements. Defining characteristics of battery quality The analysis focused on what governed safety. I prioritized three parameters for anode overhang and two for alignment. Median anode overhang per cell gave us a baseline for each brand. I used median rather than mean because a few extreme outliers would have distorted the averages. I also compared the maximum and minimum anode overhang values for each cell. Insufficient overhang increases the likelihood of lithium plating during charge, which accelerates aging and raises the probability of internal shorts. Alternatively, excessive anode length can reach the can and create a different short path. For alignment, we calculated the delta between the highest and lowest positions of both the cathode and the anode. Cylindrical cells are wound, and telescoping introduced during winding can become a seed for shorts and other defects. Large deltas point to weak process control and higher risk elsewhere in the line. Comparison of good and bad anode overhang. Side-by-side of ideal and suspicious edge alignment. Findings: Far more variance than expected The results aligned generally with our expectations, but the degree of difference was surprising. OEM cells showed tight control, with anode overhang centered near the 0.50 mm industry average and modest telescoping. The rewraps generally matched the OEM medians quite closely, though their spreads were wider, and the minimum overhang tails in particular stretched lower. Trustfire stood apart from Efest and Vapcell with a significantly worse distribution, a reminder that rewraps are blind boxes that carry real risk. Unless you scan and measure what you buy, you cannot be sure what exactly is hiding under the sleeve. The low-cost and counterfeit group was in a league of its own. Distributions were broader across every metric, and each brand in this tier produced at least one unit with negative anode overhang. The worst results came from the Temu brands. We found fourteen Treasurecase and fifteen Maxiaeon cells with cathode overhang. Across the entire low-cost group, thirty-three of 424 cells presented cathode overhang, which suggests that as many as one in thirteen such cells may carry geometry that accelerates aging and drives a higher chance of internal shorting. The standard deviations ran roughly seven times larger than the OEMs, which signals much weaker process control and, by extension, a higher likelihood of other hidden defects. Implications and recommendations These findings have implications for every stakeholder that interacts with batteries, from battery manufacturers and device integrators to end users. Original battery manufacturers prioritize quality, and the study results speak to their tight specifications and strong execution. The risk for these companies sits downstream, with scrap potentially making its way into the rewrap market, or OEM cells being “recycled” and resold when end-of-life devices are dismantled. Scrutiny of scrap procedures and channel partners, as well as improved traceability features, can protect these brands from being tarnished by the actions of less scrupulous players. Device integrators can reduce their exposure to dangerous batteries by validating their supply with incoming inspection, especially when buying through distributors or less established sources. Battery incidents can seriously mar the reputations of device integrators, making verification critical. Pack design is also essential to ensure battery safety, as building in sufficient spacing and protections can keep potential failures limited to a single cell. Consumers must also actively manage their individual battery risk exposure, given the gaps in supply chain and regulatory oversight. It’s important that users don’t mix brands, capacities, or ages in a shared device, that they protect cells from physical abuse and extreme temperatures, and that end-of-life batteries are recycled properly. Despite the popularity of “dupes,” when it comes to batteries, the savings aren’t worth the risk. Consumers should also familiarize themselves with the warning signs of battery incidents. Heat during or after charging, swelling or a soft feel, hissing, sharp chemical odors, discoloration, liquid residue, sudden drops in capacity, repeated shutdowns, or a charger that refuses to start all suggest internal damage. If you see any of these indicators, stop using the battery immediately and dispose of it at a proper facility. Parting thoughts Today’s volatile trade and tariff environment is complicating cell provenance more than ever, and it’s becoming easier and more attractive to slip gray-market substitutes into supply chains. In such a tumultuous ecosystem, CT becomes a practical tool for certainty. Our 754 non-OEM cells were mysteries until we scanned them, and while some matched OEM behavior, others fell far outside any reasonable specification. Most failures will never cause fires, but even a common reliability failure can disrupt the functionality and experience of a product. The rare battery incidents that do ignite are catastrophic, and this is why battery quality is so fundamentally important. Negative anode overhang and large irregularities in edge alignment do not guarantee failure, but they put a heavy hand on the scale in the wrong direction. Everyone who interacts with batteries, from cell manufacturers and device integrators to the people who use their products, should be intentional with managing these inherently dangerous devices. The Lumafield Battery Quality Report reveals the magnitude of risk in an uncontrolled battery supply chain. Industrial CT inspection allowed us to unearth the risky realities of the 18650 cells we ordered, by turning some of those key quality indicators into measurable geometry. Ultimately, CT is a powerful tool that can make the invisible visible by bringing much-needed clarity to the battery supply chain’s unknowns. SEO Meta Description: A closer look at the Battery Quality Report: methodology, surprising results, and what CT scanning uncovered inside low-cost lithium-ion cells. CT scans of 1,054 18650 batteries revealed major quality differences between OEM, rewrap, and low-cost cells, with defects concentrated in the cheapest brands. Negative anode overhang and poor alignment were key risks, raising the chance of internal shorts, accelerated aging, and thermal events. The study highlights supply chain vulnerabilities and shows how CT can give manufacturers, integrators, and consumers clearer visibility into battery safety.

The Quality Gap

Blind Spots in Electronics Quality

Anyone who has debugged a circuit board knows the feeling: one cold joint or hidden bridge can take down an entire system. In mass production, that same problem scales into yield loss, warranty claims, and painful late-night root-cause hunts. What makes it worse is that many of the defects causing intermittent or field failures aren’t visible to the naked eye or even to the inspection systems most factories depend on.This is the reality of modern electronics manufacturing. Solder defects are no longer surface problems. They’re buried under packages, inside layers, and beneath metal shields. And while inspection tools have improved, most of the ones in daily use were designed for a world of through-hole and early SMD components, not for today’s dense, fine-pitch assemblies.Evolution of a hidden problemThrough-hole soldering and early surface-mount components gave engineers plenty of visual feedback. You could see whether a joint was smooth, shiny, and well-formed, or cold, cracked, or bridged. A digital microscope and a steady hand were often enough to assess quality.That changed in the 1990s when Motorola introduced the Ball Grid Array (BGA). Instead of leads around the package edge, BGAs used a grid of solder balls underneath. It was a breakthrough: thousands of electrical connections in a tiny footprint. But it also created a new kind of invisibility. The solder joints that mattered most were now completely hidden.Optical inspection couldn’t reach them. Electrical tests could confirm continuity, but not explain why a joint might fail under heat or stress. The industry turned to X-ray imaging for answers.Hidden solder joints beneath a BGA packageWhat X-rays can and can’t seeTraditional 2D X-ray and automated optical inspection (AOI) remain essential tools on any electronics line. AOI quickly flags missing components, bridges, and surface anomalies. X-ray systems can reveal hidden solder joints and flag major defects like voids or bridging under BGAs. But these techniques share the same limitation: they collapse three-dimensional data into a single projection.That projection hides as much as it shows. Two defects may overlap in the same line of sight, making them look like one. Tiny voids, cracks, or head-in-pillow separations can sit just a few microns apart, enough to pass a 2D X-ray check while still creating a ticking time bomb for field reliability.For example, voids inside solder joints reduce both electrical conductivity and thermal transfer. A 2D image can suggest their presence, but not quantify their true size or location. A void near the center of a solder ball may be harmless, while one near the interface can cause catastrophic detachment after a few hundred thermal cycles. The difference is invisible without depth.CT cross-section showing voids within a BGA solder ball array (Void fraction = 0.3%).The problem of scale and densityAs packaging density increases, so does risk. A modern smartphone board can have more than a thousand solder joints per square inch, many under stacked memory, RF modules, or metal cans that never come off again after final assembly.Quad Flat No-Lead (QFN) devices compound the issue. Their large exposed center pads act as both thermal and ground planes. Poor solder coverage here increases resistance, leading to localized heating and sometimes runaway failures. Industry guidelines recommend keeping voiding below 50 percent of the pad area, but without three-dimensional data that is only a guess.Volumetric rendering of a QFN package analyzed using Lumafield VoyagerThe Head-in-Pillow (HiP) defect is even more deceptive. It occurs when a solder ball touches the pad without fully bonding. The joint can pass electrical testing at room temperature, only to fail later when the product heats up or bends. To an AOI or 2D X-ray system, HiP looks like a perfect joint. To the customer, it looks like an RMA.Inspection blind spotsThe inspection toolbox most factories rely on (AOI, in-circuit test, and 2D X-ray) was never designed to see these issues in context. Each method provides one piece of the puzzle:AOI: Fast, inexpensive, and effective for surface-level defects, but blind to hidden joints.2D X-ray: Reveals internal geometry, but lacks depth information and can’t distinguish stacked layers or subtle separations.Electrical test: Confirms whether a circuit is open or shorted, but says nothing about why or where mechanical failure will begin.Cross-sectioning: Offers a definitive view, but it’s destructive, slow, and limited to one small sample.Each tool has its place, but none can fully capture how a real solder joint behaves under heat, stress, and time.Seeing in three dimensionsComputed tomography, or CT scanning, fills that gap not because it replaces the tools above, but because it provides the depth they lack. CT builds a true 3D reconstruction of a part by rotating it under an X-ray beam and combining hundreds or thousands of projection images. The result is a volumetric model that can be sliced, measured, and analyzed from any angle.Comparison between a 2D X-ray and a 3D CT reconstruction of a Raspberry Pi Zero.For engineers dealing with solder defects, that means being able to see exactly what’s happening inside the joint. Is a void near the interface or the center? Is a bridge a solid connection or just surface wetting? Has the pad fully bonded, or is it a head-in-pillow separation waiting to fail?CT data turns those questions into measurements. You can calculate void fraction, measure ball alignment, and trace microcracks that would otherwise go unseen. Most importantly, you can do it on a fully assembled board without cutting it apart.From failure analysis to process controlUntil recently, CT was confined to the lab: expensive, slow, and limited to small samples. But faster reconstruction algorithms and more compact systems have changed that. Today, CT is used for first article inspection and even production sampling to verify solder quality across builds.2D inspection remains essential, but modern electronics demand escalation from surface checks to full-volume analysis to explain why a board passes a test one day and fails in the field the next. That is the quality gap that CT closes.CT has also become a powerful process-improvement tool. Engineers can overlay CT data across multiple builds to pinpoint where voiding increases, where temperature profiles drift, or how pad plating or paste variation influence joint integrity.In that sense, three-dimensional inspection is less about defect hunting and more about process learning. Every scan feeds back into how reflow profiles are tuned, how stencils are cut, and how reliability standards are enforced.What’s next for quality managementThe electronics industry has spent decades chasing better throughput and automation. Inspection kept pace with that evolution until components went fully hidden. Now, quality management faces a different challenge: not moving faster, but going deeper. As assemblies become smaller and denser, failure visibility becomes the defining metric. Optical systems see the surface, two-dimensional X-ray sees the outline, but only three-dimensional scanning sees the whole truth.Every tool has its place in the line, and understanding their limits is as important as knowing how to use them. The future of solder quality is not about adding more automation. A defect you can’t see is one you can’t prevent. Choosing the right level of visibility for the risk you are managing is how you prevent the next hidden flaw from escaping your line and reaching your customer.

Design to Reality

Building for the Brain: Pioneering a Long-Term Neural Implant

When you’re building an implanted medical device for the brain, you can’t cut corners. Engineering for performance is a given when you’re designing for a living system. To ensure that there are no adverse effects, an active implantable device cannot dissipate excessive heat, or there could be a risk to the surrounding tissue. Every decision, from materials, to power draw, and even packaging, is shaped by the need to do no harm. Designing a medical device is a totally different world from consumer electronics.Stakes of the SystemAt Paradromics, we’re building a brain-computer interface (BCI) to restore speech for people with severe communication disorders: conditions like ALS or spinal cord injury that disrupts the connection between intention and expression. Our first product, Connexus® BCI, records directly from the brain’s speech centers and synthesizes intended speech in real time.My focus as an electrical engineer is on the Cortical Module itself. That’s the component that sits on the surface of the brain, and it’s also the point where the technical demands are highest. The Cortical Module must be reliable, power-efficient, and manufacturable at scale. And it has to last a long time; because we are not interested in devices that require users to have brain surgery to replace their brain implant every two years as with some technologies being explored by others. Our goal is a device that never has to be replaced. That means every material choice and assembly step matters.People often compare implants like ours to wearable electronics, such as a smartwatch or continuous glucose monitor, as they share some similar goals: small size, clean data, minimal intrusion. But once you’re under the skin, everything changes. Now you’re dealing with strict FDA regulations, biocompatibility constraints, and failure modes with the highest possible stakes.Incompressible TimelinesSome timelines are just incompressible, and you have to come to terms with that. You can move fast in design, but once the project moves into manufacturing and validation, your pace becomes capped to that of regulation and biology. I wish someone had told me going into this field, that even with unlimited resources and engineering expertise, there are parts of the process you simply can’t speed up.Regulatory requirements shape design from day one. Connexus BCI is classified as a Class III medical device, the same category as a pacemaker. Implanted medical devices are typically limited to known biocompatible materials, and to support a minimum of a 10 year implant life that means materials like titanium, platinum, and gold. You can try to get new materials approved, but it’s a much longer road. And when you’re already working on a novel device, it’s wiser to avoid adding extra unknowns.Building the Plane While Flying ItThere’s no off-the-shelf playbook for what we’re doing. Our system isn’t life-supporting like a pacemaker, but it is life-enhancing. We work closely with the FDA to define safety and benefit to the patient for a device that doesn’t quite fit their existing categories. We’re being evaluated, while also helping define the rules.The metaphor we use internally is “building the plane while flying it.” It may sound chaotic, but it’s just the reality of working in a space this new. You have to keep moving forward, even while you’re clearing the path beneath your feet.Testing for the FutureThat pressure to get it right shows up most in testing. Our devices go through a long chain of inspection, step by step. Some processes require equipment so specialized there’s no commercial equivalent, meaning we have to do it ourselves. That’s why we use Lumafield's industrial CT scanner to evaluate process outcomes and observe internal structures that can’t be seen any other way. It’s one of the few tools that can keep up with the level of precision we need.In addition to testing in a large animal model, we also run accelerated aging tests, environmental stress simulations, and strenuous mechanical validation to make sure our devices can survive in the body for years. This includes checking for things like thermal performance, electrode durability, and even the consistency of raw materials from one vendor to another.Milestones That MatterThis work isn’t theoretical. Earlier this year, we completed our first human implantation in a patient undergoing unrelated brain surgery. The successful recording and data collection demonstration confirmed that our device performs well in the real world. We saw the kind of neural activity we expected and it validated years of animal studies and lab work. That milestone puts us on the path toward an Early Feasibility Study (EFS), a longer-term clinical investigation, where the device stays in place and is used regularly by a small number of participants. It’s the next big step toward FDA approval.Designed to StayI joined Paradromics right out of college in 2022, drawn to the cutting-edge intersection of engineering and neuroscience. It’s still a young field, and there’s so much left to figure out. But if we’re going to make a real difference for patients, we have to meet the body where it is. That means durability, reliability, and empathy for the people at the center of it all.This Cortical Module should feel less like a medical device and more like a part of someone’s life. If we can get there, we’ll have done our job.

Design to Reality

CT Teardown: AirPods Pro (3rd Generation)

Apple’s new AirPods Pro (3rd Generation) continues the company’s pattern of incremental but carefully executed engineering updates. With changes such as longer earbud battery life, improved noise cancellation and new health-monitoring features, Apple markets these as their most advanced earbuds so far. This teardown builds on our earlier analysis of the AirPods Pro 2.Using our Neptune industrial CT scanner, we conducted a nondestructive teardown of both the earbuds and the charging case to examine how Apple has updated the design internally. You can explore the full-resolution scans yourself inside our Voyager software by creating a free account.EarbudsInternally, the AirPods Pro 3 earbuds retain the proven architecture from the previous generation while integrating new silicon and sensors to support additional features. CT imaging quickly reveals Ball-Grid-Arrays (BGAs) integrated circuit packages distributed along the stem. This is a type of solder joint commonly used in microcontrollers to increase pin count and functionality.These integrated circuits originate from the H2 System-in-Package used in the AirPods Pro 2 but have been broken out and redistributed the integrated circuits along the stalk. Their new positions are identifiable in the CT images by their distinctive BGA solder patterns.CT imaging reveals how Apple redistributed the H2 chip functions from a compact System-in-Package in the AirPods Pro 2 to multiple BGA modules along the Pro 3’s stem, optimizing internal geometry and signal routing.BatteriesWe had initially thought that this change was made to free additional space for a larger battery as Apple had reported an increase in runtime from 6 hours (Pro 2) to 8 hours (Pro 3). However, Voyager’s Dimensioning tools show that the battery size of the Pro 3 is marginally larger at: Ø10.8 × Ø2.3 × 4.8 mm. This suggests that these improvements in runtime stem from changes in the battery’s active materials, or system-level power optimizations, rather than a dramatic increase in battery volume. The redistributed circuit board is therefore more likely driven by the new external geometry of the earbud.Cross-sections show the Pro 3 battery’s tightly wound internal structure. Despite only a small increase in size, efficiency gains and system-level optimization deliver longer playback time.New sensorsA notable addition in the AirPods Pro 3 is the photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor on the outer surface of the earbud, which detects changes in blood flow to estimate heart rate. The system uses an infrared LED to illuminate blood vessels and a photodetector to measure the reflected light, allowing it to infer blood-flow patterns. In the CT scan, the LED can be identified by the wirebond connected to its semiconductor die, with the photodetector positioned below it, together forming a reflective optical sensing path.A new blood-flow sensor integrates an infrared LED and photodetector on the outer surface of the earbud, enabling reflective optical measurements for future health-tracking features.Aside from these changes, much of the internal architecture of the earbuds such as the printed antenna, touch sensor, and the location of the three MEMS microphones remains familiar, consistent with Apple’s strategy of incremental optimization. Charging caseMoving on to the charging case, we encounter a counterintuitive change: total battery life drops from 30 hours (AirPods Pro 2) to 24 hours (AirPods Pro 3). CT imaging reveals why. In the AirPods Pro 2, Apple used two batteries inside the case; in the AirPods Pro 3, this has been reduced to a single cell.Our scans suggest that this is a packaging-driven tradeoff as the new earbud geometry appears to force more of the case electronics onto a centralized main board, with the USB-C connector now soldered on top of the PCB instead of being recessed “in-line” through a cutout as in the Pro 2 case. This taller, more centralized board must now accommodate the Ultra-Wideband (UWB) chip, the wireless-charging power circuitry, and the USB-C power-delivery hardware. In other words, Apple seems to have prioritized packaging the new earbud form-factor at the expense of some charging-case capacity.The Pro 3 charging case consolidates to a single battery cell and moves the USB-C connector to the top of the PCB, trading some capacity for a slimmer, more integrated design.Ear tipsThe ear tip packaging is entirely paper-based, using laminated stacks of paperboard to build up the height of the posts that hold the tips. This replaces the vacuum-formed plastic used in earlier generations and reflects Apple’s broader shift toward sustainable, fiber-based packaging. The laminated construction is clearly visible in CT, where multiple layers of paperboard form the structural core that holds the ear-tip.The ear tips themselves introduce a new silicone-foam hybrid construction. CT imaging suggests that the “foam” Apple describes is not a separate material but rather a micro-cellular version of the same silicone, filled with tiny gas bubbles. One possible way of producing this could be through a two-shot injection molding process: the mold is first partially filled with standard silicone, then rotated for a second injection containing silicone mixed with a blowing agent. During curing, the blowing agent releases gas, forming a soft, foamed interior while the outer silicone skin remains dense and smooth where it contacts the mold walls.Inside each tip, a rigid plastic armature provides the mechanical snap-fit interface that attaches the tip securely to the earbud and supports a mesh that prevents debris from entering the sound channelCT scans of the redesigned ear tips reveal laminated paperboard packaging and hybrid silicone-foam construction, balancing comfort, acoustic performance, and sustainability.You can explore the full scans in Voyager, our web-based industrial CT viewer. If you’re evaluating CT for your own workflows, we’re happy to help.

Materials World

Comparing Wine Corks: Natural, Technical, and Synthetic

Corks have been critical components of wine preservation for centuries, with origins dating back to the 1600s. Derived from the bark of the cork oak tree, their elasticity and impermeability has made cork the reigning king of closures. Cork oaks thrive in Mediterranean regions, with Portugal producing over half of the world’s cork. Cork is harvested by carefully removing the bark without harming the tree (every 9-12 years), allowing it to regenerate and provide cork for years to come. Historically, cork’s unique structure has made it ideal for sealing wine bottles, but as winemakers seek ways to overcome issues like TCA (trichloroanisole) contamination and inconsistent oxygen ingress, alternatives like technical and synthetic corks have started to give natural cork a run for its money. How do these types of closures differ structurally? Our Microfocus Neptune industrial CT scanner gives us comprehensive insights into the composition and density variations between natural, technical, and synthetic cork. Let’s take a look.Natural CorkNatural cork is an organic material composed of layers of cell walls, primarily made up of the plant biopolymers suberin and lignin, which give cork its signature flexibility and impermeability. Below in our Voyager window, you’ll find our CT scan of the cork. It shows a 2D view of the cork's Z axis, and if you move the slider at the bottom of the window from the right to the left, you can follow the path of the corkscrew. You can toggle between 2D and 3D views by clicking the Cardinal Z ▼ button in the upper right corner of the window.Check out the scanThe blue regions in the reconstructions represent lower-density areas, while green and yellow are medium-, and red is higher-density. The faint lines running diagonally across the cork are growth rings. We can count 9 of them, representing as many years of growth.What about the higher-density matter? The characteristic speckled texture of cork stoppers is composed of holes called lenticels, porous structures in the cork bark that facilitate gas exchange. These openings lead to lenticular channels that are either empty or filled with loose parenchyma tissue, which allow for air movement. Surrounding these channels are higher-density cell walls (green-yellow in the scan), creating a more rigid border. This structure is critical for both the cork oak tree’s respiration and cork’s role in sealing wine bottles.Cork is always cut perpendicular to the grain to prevent the lenticels from creating direct channels through the cork, which could allow oxygen ingress. This orientation interrupts the lenticular channels with denser cork material, ensuring the cork remains impermeable and provides a secure seal for wine bottles.Controlled oxygen ingress through cork is beneficial for wine aging by allowing a small amount of air to interact with the wine and develop its flavors over time. However, inconsistencies in natural cork, coupled with the risk of TCA contamination (which can lead to spoiled, “corked” wine), have driven the industry to explore closure options that embrace advances in manufacturing technology.DIAM Technical CorkThe DIAM technical cork, first introduced in the early 2000s, was developed to address TCA contamination and inconsistent oxygen ingress in natural cork. In the DIAM process, natural cork is ground into granules and then blasted with supercritical CO₂ to remove TCA and other impurities that could affect the wine’s aroma. DIAM leverages the natural strengths of cork and preserves its sensory qualities without the liabilities that have always accompanied it.During production, the cork’s suberin—a highly elastic component—is separated from lignin, which is less elastic and discarded. The suberin is then combined with microscopic spheres (similar to those used in contact lenses), filling the voids between the cork particles and reducing porosity without increasing humidity. Our scan of a DIAM 5 cork (5 grade because it’s guaranteed for a minimum of 5 years) reveals a strikingly uniform structure, with an even distribution of both higher- and lower-density material that ensures reliable oxygen ingress and minimizes variability. The path of the corkscrew is clearer here, as the agglomeration process appears to have reduced the self-healing qualities of natural cork.Check out the scanThe suberin redistribution also enhances elasticity, guaranteeing consistent performance across all corks. By removing lenticels and controlling porosity, DIAM corks provide a reliable seal without the risks of TCA or inconsistent aging, offering a solution for wines requiring both short and medium-term aging. And once DIAM establishes a track record for the long-term aging of wines, we can expect to see it used more and more.Vinventions NOMACORC Synthetic CorkThe Vinventions NOMACORC synthetic cork, made using a patented co-extrusion process, consists of an inner foam core that controls oxygen ingress and an outer flexible skin for a tight seal. The skin even has a printed design to mimic natural cork’s growth lines and lenticels. In the scan, we clearly see the highly-porous core, and the corkscrew’s path is unmistakable.Check out the scanVinventions claims the corks guarantee highly precise oxygen ingress rates, with the NOMACORC Select Green 500 that we scanned rated for 3.1 mg of oxygen after 12 months, and then 1.7 mg yearly thereafter. This control provides optimal oxygen management for wines that benefit from more exposure earlier on in their aging process. Unlike natural cork, synthetic corks are immune to TCA contamination.Synthetic corks tend to allow more oxygen ingress compared to natural or DIAM corks, which accelerates the aging process of the wine. For wines meant to be consumed quickly, this may not be a major issue, but for those intended for long aging, the higher oxygen permeability could limit use of synthetic cork for high-end wines. The VerdictWhen comparing these three corks with industrial CT, we see a clear distinction in their structure and performance. Natural cork, with its organic variability, provides a time-honored but imperfect seal, subject to the risks of TCA and oxygen variability. Technical corks offer a reliable, consistent solution that mitigates the risks of contamination while maintaining the characteristics of natural cork. Synthetic corks provide durability and are free from TCA, but their higher oxygen permeability makes them better suited for wines with shorter shelf lives.In the end, the choice of cork depends on the winemaker’s goals and the intended lifespan of the wine. Natural cork remains an iconic choice for premium, long-aging wines, while technical and synthetic closures provide reliable alternatives for those looking to minimize risks and ensure consistency. With industrial X-ray CT, we can better understand a trajectory of design that began with nature and continues to this day as packaging engineers and winemakers seek to protect the quality of their wines without sacrificing the tactile charm of cork.Learn more: CT 101

Design to Reality

Evolution of the Plastic Bottle

In the dark nights of my soul, I fret about how inconsistently engineered my life is. The coffee table I made a year or two ago was intended to look like the dining room table I built a few years earlier, but in reality the two bear only a vague resemblance to each other. Open a drawer of my tool chest at random, and perhaps you’ll find a thematically-aligned collection of well-loved hand tools, meticulously cut into a nest of Kaizen foam, or maybe you’ll find a random assortment of half-forgotten specialty wrenches. My bookshelf is nicely sorted and stacked, but my magazines are dumped into a basket this way and that. We manage to invest embarrassing amounts of engineering and infrastructure into physical objects that are barely worth mentioning. So when I look out at the world outside of my own home, I am reassured to find that even our most disposable objects are the result of staggering quantities of serious and earnest engineering work. You’ve got to give it to humanity: We don’t just put all of our design cycles on the big, impressive projects—pyramids, bridges, and semiconductor fabs. No: We manage to invest embarrassing amounts of engineering and infrastructure into physical objects that are barely worth mentioning. Stuffed animals, given away as carnival prizes, are the beneficiaries of untold logistical and supply-chain management efforts. A pair of pantyhose might contain materials that required eight or nine figures’ worth of R&D work to develop. A plastic water bottle, whose entire usable lifespan is measured in seconds, is the result of decades upon decades of engineering across a range of functions. From glass to plastic I stand up, put on my shoes, and walk over to the grocery store. The walk to the grocery store takes maybe 120 seconds, and I walk it about once a day. I recognize that this is absurdly frequent and revel in treating the grocery store as an extension of my pantry. Today, I get ketchup and crackers then scoot around to the dairy aisle for unsalted butter. Walking past the bottled water I pause—the selection there is honestly incredible, a little Darwinian competition playing out on the shelves. I stand there, registering the different phenotypes and thinking about how each species and sub-species of water bottle evolved. A guy in his thirties reaches in front of me to grab a gallon-sized jug of Poland Spring from the shelf. I make room for him, consider my options, and for some reason end up with a liter each of Pellegrino, Evian, and Smartwater. As weird as it sounds, water from the Evian source was bottled in earthenware jugs from 1826 all the way until 1908. Glass and glassblowing were not all that reliable in the belly of the nineteenth century, but around the turn of the twentieth, glass technology had trickled down from lenses and lightbulbs to proliferate within beverage packaging. If you were starting a bottling company in 1900, you probably started in glass. Coca-Cola was first bottled (in glass) in 1899, the same year that Pellegrino, with their distinctive green glass bottle, was founded. Evian switched to glass in 1908. Coke’s acrylonitrile misadventure While synthetic plastics were first developed in the 1880s, and Dustin Hoffman was getting lectured about the material’s business potential in 1967, it wasn’t until the mid-‘70s that food-safe (or at least vaguely food-compatible) formulations began to roll out. One of the most notable of these was acrylonitrile copolymer, which was brought to market in the form of Coca-Cola’s “Easy-Goer” bottle in 1975. Coke’s acrylonitrile bottles lasted less than two years on the market. From an engineering perspective, acrylonitrile copolymer was a great fit for soda bottles. It was transparent, tough, and impervious to gas. Coca-Cola executives touted its “environmental advantages” (namely its lower shipped weight) and its resistance to biodegradation, claiming that the bottles, which were manufactured by Monsanto, would cost “essentially the same as glass.” Pepsi, who had also been working on plastic bottles, fumed on the sidelines. While Coke was camped out at a hotel launching the Easy-Goer, Pepsi held a competing PR event, down the hall at the same hotel, to unveil “a champagne from the Soviet Union.” The short career (1975-1977) of Coke’s Monsanto-designed Easy-Goer acrylonitrile bottle. This author was unable to definitively identify imagery of Pepsi’s Soviet champagne, but this state-owned Russian site seems to indicate it was Nazdorovya. The Easy-Goer bottles were, to my taste, a bit on the chunky side. Coke’s acrylonitrile bottles lasted less than two years on the market. It turns out acrylonitrile bottles will leach acrylonitrile into whatever liquids they contain; furthermore, test animals who were fed “large amounts of acrylonitrile in their drinking water” developed “significantly lower body weight and other adverse effects, including lesions in the central nervous system and growths in the ear ducts.” The FDA banned acrylonitrile beverage containers in March of 1977; Monsanto sued and lost; Coke looked to other materials. Injection Stretch Blow Molding (ISBM) Here’s how most plastic beverage bottles are made today: A bottle preform, also known as a parison, is typically injection-molded out of PET. The preform looks kind of like a test tube, with threads at its mouth and a disc-like collar just below. Its walls are thick. Maybe it’s stored for a while, still devoid of cap, but eventually it’s installed onto a stretch blow molding machine where it’s heated, stretched lengthwise internally with a metal rod, and injected with compressed air, blowing up rapidly like a balloon before being cooled and spat out. The same preform might be blown into a variety of different bottle designs, each with different volumes and wall thicknesses and design details, but their thread profiles and necks will remain identical to the preform from which they were made. Coke’s Easy-Goers had metal caps, but today virtually all plastic bottles are also capped in plastic. Plastic caps are injection or compression molded, with their tamper-evident rings attached. The injection molds are honestly beautiful—polished, multi-part assemblies, with twelve or twenty-four or forty-eight caps all being molded at the same time. Watching caps being compression molded, meanwhile, is mesmerizing: semi-soft blobs of plastic goop being extruded, cut, and squished into a rotating tool that then dumps a finished cap assembly off of its backside. Either way, when caps meet their bottles the bottles will have been filled with some fluid, and in some cases pressurized with carbon dioxide gas (for that bubbly sizzle) or liquid nitrogen (for structural and preservative reasons). This all happens at staggeringly high speed, dozens of bottles per second, tens of thousands of bottles per hour, frankly unfathomable numbers of bottles per day. Injection stretch blow molding forms bottles in two stages: a heated PET preform is stretched and blown inside a mold, aligning the polymer chains to create a lightweight container with high strength and clarity. The rise of PET Again, I’m struck by the stupidly obvious fact that human beings invented all of this stuff. Real people, with dreams and fears and families to support, spent big chunks of their lives inventing not only the beverage packaging itself but the machinery required to make, fill, cap, and package these unfathomable numbers of bottles. Disposable water bottle engineering is a career path that you could choose, and if you did choose it then you would not be alone in having done so. While Monsanto had been toiling away on their yet-unproven acrylonitrile copolymer bottles, there was an entirely different group, at DuPont, working on polyethylene terephthalate. Even more incredible is the fact that some of Dustin Hoffman’s contemporaries—indeed lots of them—chose careers in plastic bottle engineering, even before plastic bottles had been proven viable. While Monsanto had been toiling away on their yet-unproven acrylonitrile copolymer bottles, there was an entirely different group, at DuPont, working on polyethylene terephthalate. Polyethylene Terephthalate, “PET.” So many ethylenes! Take a bunch of gaseous ethylene molecules, and catalyze them with metal salts such that they form long, caterpillar-like solid molecules, with each segment containing one carbon atom and two hydrogen atoms. In this form, bulk polyethylene can be incredibly strong and durable, especially when the caterpillar-like molecules get really long. (Ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene, whose chained-together ethylenes can be hundreds of thousands of units long, has yield strengths comparable to steel—at dramatically lower densities. Lots of high-end sailing rigging is made from this stuff, and also ultralight camping gear.) Polyethylene is also environmentally stable, optically clear, and doesn’t, like acrylonitrile, leach into food or beverages that it’s put into contact with. People have been catalyzing polyethylene this way for about 75 years now, and because of its remarkable physical properties, we now make more of the stuff than any other polymer; today, global annual polyethylene production is something on the order of a hundred million metric tons—equivalent in mass to almost eight years’ worth of New York City’s solid trash production. Within two years of the Easy-Goer’s downfall, DuPont was in full production, making two-liter PET bottles for the Coca-Cola company’s caramel-colored sugar water. I can just imagine the excitement at DuPont’s polyethylene team when the FDA put an end to Coke’s acrylonitrile adventures. DuPont had been working on soda bottles since at least 1967, when Nathaniel Wyeth (a DuPont “engineering fellow” who was also the other brother of painter Andrew Wyeth) began tinkering with polypropylene. By this time the younger Wyeth had a painting in the permanent collection at MoMA; I imagine Nathaniel, the less famous Wyeth, crawling around in the chemical weeds, grasping for some way to make his own name. Finally he found his path through the undergrowth: A “hollow thermoplastic article,” which he patented in 1973. Within two years of the Easy-Goer’s downfall, DuPont was in full production, making two-liter PET bottles for the Coca-Cola company’s caramel-colored sugar water. Wyeth’s 1990 obituary showcases his invention of the now-ubiquitous PET plastic soda bottle. Source: New York Times. I actually remember these bottles from the birthday parties of my youth. Produced from the late ‘70s until the early ‘90s, the first generation of enormous PET beverage containers, with their opaque, glued-on bases, arose in tandem with the soda industry’s shift to high fructose corn syrup. Both “New” Coke and “Crystal” Pepsi were packaged in these thick-walled, two-liter bottles, our parents using two hands to pour them into our trembling plastic cups. These bottles were totems to American excess, their contents slowly going flat in the fridge if they weren’t spilled all over the dining room table first. Looking back at these beefy containers, one can’t help but feel that it’s all too much. Too much sugar, too much plastic, too much overt product placement in our holiday movies. The walls on Coke’s early two-liter bottles were around 0.3 to 0.4 mm thick, and their glued-on bases (which were necessary because the bottles themselves had round bottoms—good for resisting internal pressure, but terrible at standing upright) measured up to 0.6 mm. As a result, the total mass of an empty two-liter bottle was up to 96 grams—exactly double that of modern two-liter bottles. This was, from today’s standpoint, a low-volume product, not really optimized for cost or transportation. The beverage industry had figured out how to get the public to buy their drinks in disposable plastic bottles, but they hadn’t figured out how to efficiently produce and sell billions of them every year. Industrial CT scans show a reduction in wall thickness that allowed packaging engineers to cut the total mass of the 2L bottle in half since the introduction of PET beverage bottles. For more on the original vs. present day Coke bottle, check out Scan of the Month. But you can be sure that corporate chemical engineers (and marketers) were working hard on just that problem. By the early 1990s, both Coke and Pepsi figured out just what beverage they could sell us billions of disposable plastic bottles of. The solution didn’t come from a mountain spring, or a Soviet vineyard, or the concentrated carbohydrates extracted from industrially-farmed corn. No, the killer application for the disposable plastic bottle industry was a municipal water tap in Wichita, Kansas. Bottled water boom Looking back on it now, the bottled water boom feels like a ridiculous—yet understandable—evolution of our early ‘90s milk-cartons-and-two-liter-soda-bottles culture. The signs were there in 1992, when after a bidding war, Nestlé acquired Perrier, gaining not only the distinctively bubbly French brand but also Poland Spring, Arrowhead, and Great Bear in the same transaction. Then in 1994, Pepsi introduced Aquafina, with its clear half-liter bottles and unremarkable branding sketching out the decidedly middlebrow aesthetic that would define the emerging mass-market bottled water industry. Not to be left behind, Coke launched Dasani (a direct competitor to Aquafina, albeit with slightly more distinctive branding) in 1999. These brands’ yuppie appeal never really spoke to me personally; they felt gauche, corporate, superfluous. But I do recall buying bottles of Vitaminwater (the Glacéau-owned sister-brand to Smartwater) and thinking of myself (then a teenager) as sophisticated, and vaguely “alternative.” This feeling lasted roughly until the precise moment when Glacéau was acquired by Coca-Cola, in May of 2007. In the years that followed I purchased their products only in times of distress. Today’s lightweight half-liter water bottles use 75% less plastic than those on the market in the mid-2000s. Regardless of my own feelings, I must admit that brands like Aquafina, Dasani, and Smartwater did good work in helping Pepsi and Coke replace their declining soda sales in the late ‘90s and the early ‘00s. They also gave the soda giants an opportunity to really cost-engineer their bottling operations, tweaking their bottle and cap designs to reduce mass and shorten manufacturing cycle times. “Petaloid” bottle bases, which came to prominence in the ‘90s, eliminated the need for glued-on bases—reducing material usage while distributing stress more evenly across the bottle’s walls. Thinner bottle walls (Aquafina’s were around .2 mm) and shorter caps meant faster bottle production; spiral ribbing on the bottles’ walls meant that they could be stacked higher and would resist damage during shipping. Dasani- and Aquafina-branded vending machines, stocked by existing soft drink distributors, kept products moving through supply chains efficiently. Eventually, many water bottlers—Coke, Pepsi, Evian, Nestlé—switched portions of their production to 100% recycled polyethylene, which has proven to be durable, commercially desirable, and food-safe. Lightweighting and efficiency Once bottled water proved itself as a high-volume consumer product, its variations proliferated. Look in almost any beverage section, in any store in the US, and you’ll find water packaged not only in PET bottles but also in glass, aluminum cans, and multi-layered paperboard boxes. My tiny urban grocery store allocates about as much shelf space to bottled water as they do to bread. Even tiny, outer-borough NYC bodegas usually carry broad arrays of bottled water brands, many of which are shipped in from halfway around the world. Niagara (a privately-held company with around 7,500 employees working in more than a dozen bottling facilities) claims to have reduced the amount of plastic in their half-liter bottle by 60% since 1998, with similarly impressive reductions in their carbon footprint. As the market evolved, a staggering amount of work was done to reduce the mass of commodity-grade disposable water bottles. Today, even white-labeled water bottles—bland, bottom-of-the-barrel brands, mostly devoid of character and sold only in racks of twenty-four or greater—benefit from decades upon decades of optimization. An excellent example of this is the Niagara “Eco-Air” half-liter bottle, variations of which are sold under house-label brands like Walgreens’ Nice!, Costco’s Kirkland, and Albertson’s Signature Select. Niagara (a privately-held company with around 7,500 employees working in more than a dozen bottling facilities) claims to have reduced the amount of plastic in their half-liter bottle by 60% since 1998, with similarly impressive reductions in their carbon footprint. Flimsy in the hand even when full of water, their bottles have wall thicknesses of less than 0.17 mm. PET bottles offer one of the most efficient packaging-to-product ratios, combining minimal material use with strong protection and product safety. Both the bottles and caps are fully recyclable and contain no added BPA. Source: Niagara Bottling. Even so, these flyweight bottles are surprisingly strong, their physical properties tuned to the needs of modern logistical and commercial infrastructure. Bottles like Niagara’s Eco-Air (which is similar to Poland Spring’s half-liter bottle) are typically shrink-wrapped into 32-bottle packs, which are then shipped hundreds or thousands of miles before they’re dumped on our grocery stores’ loading areas. These brick-like bundles of plasticized water are not handled with a ton of care en route, and in the case of my grocery store they’re piled in chest-high stacks near the check-out aisles. This is what manufacturers like Niagara cares about: Their bottles need to be just strong enough to survive the trip to my grocery store, and then the subsequent jaunt to whatever block party or school potluck they might be ripped open at. Because once their caps are unscrewed, these bottles’ half-lives are measured in seconds. Recycling and reuse Half-liter bottles like the Eco-Air are ubiquitous in my neighborhood. There are hundreds of them at each of the corner stores within crawling distance of my stoop, and additional dozens of them (emptied of their original contents, and then sometimes filled with something less refreshing) on the sidewalks and curbs nearby. We are lucky if these bottles end up in landfills; they certainly end up in worse places much of the time. After I had drunk my liter of San Pellegrino straight from its green glass bottle, I tossed the bottle into the recycling bin with a confusing mixture of pride and shame. A few days later, the city’s Sanitation Department picked it up; I know from experience that it was bound to be broken up into little green glass chips at a transfer facility on the shore of the New York Harbor. But my crushed Pellegrino bottle isn’t sorted into a big pile of pure green glass; it’s mixed with other colored glass, which is difficult to sort into its constituent parts and can’t easily be re-melted into new containers. More or less useless at that point, this multicolored melange is likely to be sold as fill material for an infrastructure project—if it’s not landfilled directly. What’s next for packaging? It’s harder to say where the plastic bottles I purchased will end up. After drinking the Evian and the Smartwater, I found myself refilling both of their PET bottles with NYC tap water, and over the following weeks I proudly—and repeatedly—lugged one or the other of them with me as I biked to the climbing gym, hoping secretly that someone there would recognize them as some of the most popular water containers among the ultralight hiking community But at some point even the luckiest and most long-lived polyethylene bottles will be trashed. But, who knows. If you wait around long enough, someone’s bound to start working on solving that problem too.

Recall Radar

Fall on Fire

October runs hot. Pocketable gadgets smolder, wall-powered gear misbehaves where doors, ducts, and consoles meet heat, and vehicles remind us how small omissions ripple into busy spaces. A few welds and joints call it quits under real loads, while kid gear and clinical tools expose the quiet failures of access control and visibility. None of this is exotic. It is energy looking for an exit and interfaces aging faster than their spec sheets. Read the month as a tour of thin margins, and you will see why the headlines keep catching fire. Lithium-Ion batteries linger on the list Each month, portable lithium-ion batteries are inevitably recalled. ESR’s HaloLock wireless power banks, Zyntony’s Kogalla power banks, Anker power banks, Living Glow portable waist fans, IcyBreeze Buddy portable misting fans, and Arizer Solo II portable vaporizers were all recalled for fire or burn hazards tied to lithium-ion batteries. EcoFlow’s Delta Max 2000 power stations were recalled for overheating and ignition risk. These recalls are a testament to the sheer volume of lithium-ion battery powered devices that are sold on a daily basis. The Kogalla power banks represent the low end, with 2,400 devices impacted. In the middle, EcoFlow’s Delta Max 2000 lands near 25,030 and Living Glow’s portable waist fans sit around 48,000. Anker’s power bank recall, which encompasses five models, spans a whopping 481,000 units. x The concentration of portable products with overheating language signals a category risk where compact packaging, varied charge profiles, and real-world usage stack the deck against thermal margins. These parts might pass inspection initially, but for devices that live in pockets, bags, and hot rooms, reliability is key. One more entry belongs here even though it plugs in. iFIT’s NordicTrack rowing machines report screen console electronics that can overheat and ignite, about 44,800 units in the United States and about 700 in Canada. It is a reminder that small, insulated electronics mounted on larger mains-powered products can face the same overheating risks as portable devices. Seams under stress Where heat and load meet, weak links show themselves. Sunbeam’s Oster French Door countertop ovens carry a burn hazard when doors can close unexpectedly, with about 1,290,000 units in the United States and about 104,195 in Canada affected. VESTA.DS VST tankless water heaters can crack at the exhaust duct and release gases, including carbon monoxide, indoors, about 36,700 units in the United States, plus 3,500 Canadian sales. RH’s Byron tables and desks can collapse when a gap opens at the leg to top interface, about 750 units, and Super Wheels’ Vaast A/1 bicycle frames can fracture near a weld, about 1,860 units. Ordinary parts can carry extraordinary consequences. Doors that drift, ducts that fatigue, and welds that see side loads become the story once heat and cycling pile up. Whether the tally is a million units or a few hundred, the same pattern appears: failures concentrate at thermal interfaces and load-bearing joints. This is familiar physics at work, with thin margins revealed by use, time, and temperature. Hazards at any speed Here the risks meet bystanders. Textron E-Z-GO personal transportation vehicles can leak gasoline at a quick-connect near the injector, about 90,800 units in the United States plus Canadian sales. Yamaha fields two golf car campaigns, one for missing stop lights in about 19,300 vehicles from model years 2021 to 2025, and one for potential brake failure in about 4,300 vehicles from model years 2017 to 2024. Wilteexs bioethanol fuel bottles lack flame-mitigation devices and carry “Non Toxic” claims, about 1,100 units, raising flash-fire risk. Different mechanics, same exposure: small misses in connectors and signals become public hazards in parking lots, paths, and garages. These are ordinary environments, which makes them unforgiving. Parking lots, paths, and garages leave little separation between a small defect and a person. People read cues by habit; they assume brake lights exist and fuel stays contained. When those assumptions fail, risk extends beyond the user to everyone nearby. Small configuration splits across trims, suppliers, or model years can escape notice until they show up in the field. Fuel containers sit under the same quiet expectation, and without flame mitigation a routine pour can turn into a flash event. Small batteries, big risks Two children’s products turn on a single access point. About 740 LED tutu skirts sold by Bmrwtg allow easy access to coin cells and lack the warnings required by Reese’s Law. About 3,000 Youbeien crib mobiles have remotes whose battery doors can be opened without a common household tool. The scale is modest compared with appliance recalls, but the hazard is concentrated and severe. Small parts compliance is binary, and real-world handling includes repeated openings, flex, and pry attempts by curious kids. Battery enclosures and labeling must be treated as safety-critical, with lot-to-lot checks and post-use fit tests. Patient safety at stake Two medical device recalls sit squarely on reliability at the point of care. On September 22, 2025, Olympus flagged ViziShot 2 FLEX 19G EBUS-TBNA needles for components that may detach during procedures. On October 7, 2025, Trividia Health recalled TRUE METRIX blood glucose meters for LCD defects that can affect performance. Unit counts are not stated here, but both products inform clinical decisions in real time, which raises the consequence of even limited populations. In practical terms, devices must keep their components secure and present clear, trustworthy readings. When either falters, clinicians lose signal or confidence at the moment they need it most. Patterns worth testing Look across October and the same physics keep showing up. Thermal headroom and honest derating decide whether packs and console boards stay uneventful. Containment and vent paths determine if fuel and exhaust stay where they belong. Doors, latches, ducts, and weld toes carry more safety load than their bill of materials suggests. On low-speed vehicles, stop lights and braking are the guardrails for shared space. In children’s products, safety turns on controlled access to coin cells and correct warnings. In clinical tools, it depends on parts that stay attached and displays that stay readable. The misses rarely sit in the marquee component. They live in a hinge that lost hold-open force, a quick-connect that seeped under vibration, an exhaust duct that thinned with heat, a display interconnect that drifted, a battery door that loosened after use, a weld toe that carried side load. Treat this month as a map of where engineering time tends to matter most: thermal interfaces, joints under side load, basic vehicle signaling, and battery access. Use it to prioritize test time and supplier controls in the next build cycle. Curious how I keep track of this constant barrage of recalls? Check out our new Recall Roundup tool to access a comprehensive database of product recalls, updated daily from CPSC and NHTSA records. We also discuss recalls in every episode of our podcast, Go/No-Go.

From The Floor

Finding Lead in Stanley's Quencher

In a remarkable story of product innovation, Stanley became, in the words of its Global President Terence Reilly, a “110-year-old overnight success.” The company’s journey from inventing the first vacuum-sealed water bottle in 1913 to becoming a TikTok sensation began with the launch of the Quencher tumbler in 2016. The Quencher initially saw modest success, but a strategic shift in 2020 towards vibrant new colors and finishes caught the eye of a new generation of consumers. This pivot, coupled with savvy social media marketing and influencer collaborations, caused Stanley's revenue to skyrocket from $70 million in 2019 to $750 million in 2023.More recently, the same social media enthusiasm that propelled Stanley to new heights has revealed itself as a double-edged sword. Social media influencers have discovered that lead solder is used in the Quencher’s manufacturing process, jeopardizing Stanley’s success. But is the lead in the Quencher actually dangerous? Our Neptune industrial X-ray CT scanner is the perfect tool to see inside Stanley’s tumbler to understand how it’s made and whether or not lead solder truly poses a risk to consumers.Stanley’s cups have inner and outer walls made of stainless steel, separated by a vacuum that minimizes heat transfer. The manufacturing process for vacuum-insulated stainless steel containers starts by forming two separate stainless steel layers for the inner and outer walls, which are then welded together at the rim to create a sealed unit. The cup is placed in a vacuum chamber, and air is removed through a hole that’s left in the bottom of the outer layer.At this point, the hole through which air was evacuated must be sealed before the cup is removed from the vacuum chamber. Lead solder provides a reliable and cost-effective answer. During the assembly of the inner and outer layers, a small lead pellet is placed above the air-escape hole. After the air is pulled out of the cup, the vacuum chamber is heated just enough to melt the lead, causing it to flow into the air escape hole and seal it. When the vacuum chamber is opened, a vacuum remains between the cup’s walls.In our CT scans, we can clearly see the inner and outer stainless steel flask layers, as well as the solder point. We also see a metal disk attached to a welded tab, which may be a component used to position the solder and hold it in place before it’s melted. Dense materials or those made of elements with higher atomic numbers attenuate (absorb or scatter) X-rays more. Lead is very dense and tends to block X-rays, which is why it’s used to protect people from X-ray radiation. In Voyager, we’ve applied a color map to the reconstruction that corresponds to the range of material attenuation coefficients. Lead, the most attenuating, appears here as a solid red. The scan shows that the lead solder is completely shielded by a stainless steel cover just below it.Stanley issued a statement saying, “Once sealed, this area is covered with a durable stainless steel layer, making it inaccessible to consumers. Rest assured that no lead is present on the surface of any Stanley product that comes into contact with the consumer nor the contents of the product. In the rare occurrence the base cap of a product comes off due to ordinary use and exposes this seal, it is eligible for our Lifetime Warranty.” Leaded solder, despite its known health risks, remains widely used in various industries, including electronics, due to its superior workability and lower melting point compared to unleaded alternatives. The Stanley revelation has sparked a debate on the difficult trade-offs manufacturers face between continuing with a well-established but potentially harmful material or investing in the development of safer—albeit more expensive and technically challenging—alternatives.In response to the controversy, other reusable water bottle companies have been highlighting their lead-free manufacturing processes. Brands like Owala, Hydro Flask, and Klean Kanteen have successfully eliminated lead from their products, opting for alternative materials such as noncrystalline silica beads or proprietary sealants. These companies demonstrate that while the transition to lead-free manufacturing is complex and costly, it is feasible and aligns with growing consumer demand for environmentally friendly and safe products.As consumers become more discerning about the products they buy, the pressure on companies to not compromise on safety or sustainability will only increase. Perhaps just as important as continued innovation is educating consumers on the relative risks associated with materials and manufacturing processes. Proactively demystifying the product's lifecycle and design choices could mean the difference between soaring success and a viral backlash.

Materials World

From Rust to Silicon: A Week of Storage Media

Before storage vanished into silicon, it lived on film, glass, and metal. The moving parts and chemical coatings of these physical systems responded to specific engineering constraints and the demands of their respective moments. This week we use industrial CT to examine how five iconic formats worked, how they evolved, and why some still matter.Day 1: Magnetic TapeMagnetic tape appears outdated at first glance. It predates microprocessors, uses sequential access, and sits in silent racks. But it quietly stores much of the internet’s long-term memory. What explains its persistence?Tape began in the 1950s with mainframes writing data to reels of acetate or PET film coated in iron oxide. In the 1980s, home computers like the VIC‑20 used audio cassettes to store data as modulated tones, slow at 50 bytes per second, but accessible and cheap. Its survival comes down to physics and economics. Tape is a PET strip coated in magnetic particles, written to by aligning domains with a read/write head. It’s not fast, but it is dense, efficient, and durable.LTO, or Linear Tape‑Open, refines this idea. Cartridges use serpentine writing across dozens of tracks. LTO‑9 holds up to 45 terabytes compressed, with built-in error correction. Stored offline, these cartridges are immune to ransomware and accidental deletion.A 2024 report shows LTO shipments hitting 176.5 exabytes compressed, a 15 percent rise. IEEE Spectrum notes that tape, once written, uses no power and retains data longer and more affordably than disk or flash. As IBM’s Mark Lantz put it, “The technology hasn’t been frozen in time. Quite the contrary.”LTO remains the archival medium of choice for Amazon, Google, and CERN; it lasts up to 30 years under the right conditions. What may first look like legacy analogue tech turns out to be a refined archive engine designed for decades of reliable operation.Give the CT scan of the LTO a spin in our Voyager window above. Internal reels, guide rollers, and reinforced structures reveal a tightly engineered storage system designed for precision and longevity. Tape, it turns out, is built to last.Day 2: Floppy Disks and PocketZipFloppy disks made personal computing portable and practical. The first commercial version (the truly floppy one), released in 1971, was 8 inches across and held just 80 kilobytes. It paved the way for more manageable sizes. By the late 1970s, the 5¼-inch disk became standard for early home and business computers, offering between 360 kilobytes and 1.2 megabytes of storage.In the 1980s, a more durable format emerged: the 3½-inch floppy. Its rigid plastic shell (no longer physically floppy) and metal shutter protected the magnetic film inside, reducing dust contamination and physical damage. At 1.44 megabytes, it could store documents, program files, or even entire operating systems. These disks became a defining storage format for the personal computing era, remaining in common use into the early 2000s. Even today, the floppy icon still represents the Save function on many programs.Iomega’s Zip and PocketZip formats attempted to extend this logic. The original Zip disk reached 750 megabytes by the end of its run. PocketZip, launched in 1999, packed 40 megabytes into a cartridge roughly the size of a matchbook. Its performance was impressive for the time, but the format suffered from alignment issues and media wear. The rapid rise of USB flash drives and solid-state storage soon rendered it obsolete.In the scan of the 3.5-inch floppy, we see the dense, layered magnetic disk enclosed in its rigid plastic shell. The sliding metal shutter, which protects the media surface, is reinforced and spring-loaded. Also note the fine pitch of the read-write aperture and the minimal clearance between moving parts: tolerances that allowed reliable operation despite the format’s physical simplicity.Day 3: ROMBefore optical discs and downloadable software, ROM cartridges were the primary medium for consumer electronics. Popularized by consoles like the Atari 2600 and Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), these plastic modules held pre-programmed data on a silicon chip known as mask ROM. When inserted into a console, the system could execute software directly from the cartridge without the need to copy data into RAM.Each cartridge housed a printed circuit board, a ROM chip, and a set of exposed edge connectors. These aligned with spring-loaded contacts in the console, forming a direct electrical path. Unlike magnetic or optical media, ROM chips had no moving parts. They offered fast load times, physical durability, and built-in copy protection. But manufacturing was expensive, and the memory was fixed at fabrication.Many users remember blowing into the cartridge to fix loading issues. This ritual sought to remove dust from the contacts, but it was rarely effective and often counterproductive. Moisture from breath could corrode the gold or nickel-plated pins over time. The real issue was usually poor contact alignment or oxide buildup on the connector surfaces.Though cartridges faded as storage expanded and costs fell, they remain in use today in embedded systems and industrial equipment, where durability and immutability still matter.Our CT scan of a ROM cartridge shows the chip mounted directly to the PCB with clean solder joints and a rigid housing. The edge connector is precisely spaced, designed to maintain tight electrical contact even after thousands of insertions.Day 4: Magneto-Optical DiscsMagneto‑Optical (MO) discs blend magnetic and optical storage principles in a single hybrid system. Commercialized in 1985, they offered erasable, high-reliability storage long before affordable writable CDs appeared. MO media was typically 5.25‑inch or 3.5‑inch cartridges. The smaller version appeared in 1991 with capacities from about 128 MB up to 1.3 GB.MO writing uses a two-step process: a laser heats a magnetic film spot to its Curie point. A magnetic head on the opposite side then sets the domain orientation. Reading uses a lower‑power laser to detect changes in polarization caused by the Kerr effect. Time‑consuming though it was, verification after writing made it highly reliable and durable, with tens of millions of rewrite cycles possible.Enterprise archives like legal, medical, or media libraries looked to MO disks as a durable alternative to tape or early optical media. The cartridges physically protected surfaces from dust and fingerprints, and the media could tolerate temperature and humidity variations better than early CDs.Our scan shows a thick ferromagnetic recording layer enclosed in robust polycarbonate casing. The dual-side configuration leaves just enough room for both the laser window and precise magnetic write head spacing. The cartridge’s sturdy guide system ensures laser alignment and minimal contact pressure.Day 5: Hard Drives and Solid StateHard drives store data magnetically on spinning platters made of glass or aluminum, coated with cobalt alloy or iron oxide. Read and write heads hover nanometers above the surface to flip magnetic domains as the platters rotate. Consumer drives typically spin at 5,400 or 7,200 RPM. Multi-platter setups allow higher capacity by stacking more heads and surfaces in a compact enclosure.These drives helped shape modern computing, offering fast random access and low cost per gigabyte. But they are vulnerable to shock, wear, and latency limits.Solid-state drives replaced moving parts with NAND flash memory. Floating-gate transistors retain charge without power, enabling fast, shock-resistant, and silent operation. SSD controllers manage data distribution, wear leveling, and error correction. NVMe models use direct PCIe access to deliver transfer speeds beyond 7 GB/s.SSDs have grown rapidly in both performance and reliability. According to Ars Technica, five years of data from Backblaze show that SSDs fail far less often than hard drives over time.The CT scan of a Lite-On SSD shows NAND packages arranged around a central controller. You can see dense surface-mount components, multi-layer routing, and clean solder joints.Storage for PosterityIf future engineers scanned today’s storage media a hundred years from now, what would they learn about how we valued information?Over five days, we examined storage formats that shaped computing: tape, floppy, ROM, optical, and solid state. Each one reflects tradeoffs between speed, cost, permanence, and complexity.Industrial CT shows these are not just passive containers. They are engineered systems, often with precision far beyond what their plastic shells suggest. Even the most outdated format holds clues about the priorities and constraints of its time, saying as much about us as the data it holds.

Design to Reality

Heinz’s Sustainable Ketchup Cap

Heinz has taken a major step forward for sustainable packaging with the introduction of its first fully recyclable ketchup cap, made possible through a pioneering collaboration with Berry Global. Combining complex engineering with simple materials, Heinz’s achievement offers a model for manufacturers in consumer packaged goods (CPG) as well as food and agriculture at large to strive for waste reduction by designing more environmentally-friendly products.Industrial CT is the perfect tool for exploring the intricacies of Heinz's new cap design without damaging it, even while it’s fully assembled and closed. Let’s take a look.Mono-material constructionThe old cap featured a silicone valve, which posed recycling challenges. The new cap's uniform composition of polypropylene (PP) simplifies recycling and can be accepted by any facility that processes plastic #5. Currently only about 3% of PP products are being recycled in the United States, but it is becoming more widely accepted. The new cap appears as a uniform color in Voyager’s range map, indicating that it’s entirely made of the same material. Compare it to the old cap, whose silicone valve is denser than the surrounding plastic.The dense silicone ring (left) presents obstacles for recycling. The new mono-material cap (right) is of a uniform density.Innovative valve designThe new design leverages ketchup's shear-thinning property to dispense the perfect amount. Ketchup requires a specific amount of pressure to flow. When the bottle is squeezed, it moves through the outer channels where the wall separating them from the inner channels plays a crucial role. The wall prevents the ketchup from flowing back and directs it toward the antechamber, building the necessary pressure for the ketchup to pass through the nozzle efficiently.Once the squeezing stops, the ketchup's viscosity increases, preventing drips and mess. This design ensures a clean and controlled dispense of the product.Views from below (left) and above (right) of the Heinz ketchup cap's valve channelsIndustrial CT and sustainabilityDeveloping sustainable packaging can present a significant engineering challenge. Recyclable plastics often don’t perform as well as their non-recyclable counterparts, and reducing material usage can mean that safety factors are reduced as well. Effective, sustainable packaging requires careful design and lots of fine tuning.Industrial CT plays a pivotal role in the development of sustainable packaging, offering a non-invasive method to analyze, refine, and perfect packaging solutions. By reducing the need for physical prototypes, CT scanning accelerates the development process, cuts down on waste, and helps avoid the costs associated with scrapped prototypes and recalled products. It embodies the convergence of innovation and sustainability, offering a blueprint for the packaging industry's next steps.Advanced Surface Capture technology can help manufacturers tell the whole story of their sustainability efforts by visualizing areas that are otherwise impossible to capture—those hidden by overhangs as well as shiny and reflective surfaces.Heinz's recyclable cap is more than just an innovation; it's a statement of intent, reflecting a broader commitment to environmental sustainability. The cap's successful redesign, fueled by a $1.2 million investment and extensive testing, demonstrates the potential for significant waste reduction—up to 300 million plastic caps annually—and a future where packaging is fully recyclable, reusable, or compostable.Learn moreDownload our free white paper Removing Obstacles to Sustainable Packaging and discover how industrial x-ray CT can help packaging engineers create solutions that work.

Design to Reality

How Does a Car Cigarette Lighter Work?

Remember this? Cigarette lighters were universal accessories in cars until the mid-1990s. We put one in a CT scanner to see how it works and discovered a marvel of efficient, low-cost analog design.Check out the video below to see the cigarette lighter in action and walk through the CT scans with us:An analog systemA cigarette lighter in a car connects to a 12V DC power supply. To heat it up, you press the handle in. It starts to draw current, and after a few moments, the handle pops up, revealing a glowing coil hot enough to ignite a cigarette. You might think such a system would involve a thermostat, a microcontroller, and an actuator, but this design, developed in the 1950s, is entirely analog and optimized for simplicity and cost-efficiency.Type image caption here (optional)Examining the CT scansWe used a Neptune industrial CT scanner to capture detailed scans of the lighter. This scanner works on the same principle as a medical CT scanner, capturing X-ray images from different angles and reconstructing them into a 3D model.Lighter in the popped-out positionIn this scan, the lighter assembly is in its popped-out position, as it would be after heating. By stripping away the less dense plastics, we isolated the metal components for a clearer view.Give the lighter a spin for yourself in the Voyager window below:Cutting into the model, we see the removable lighter with a large bolt fixing the plastic handle. Surrounding the handle is a single coil spring. The heating element is visible in the center, with another bolt below it attached to the arms of a spring clip. The coloring indicates relative material density, showing stamped steel and a ceramic insulator around the lower bolt.Lighter in the pushed-in positionNext, we examined the lighter after the handle has been pushed in, simulating its heating configuration. The heating element is held in place by the spring clip, creating a circuit.In a car, the bottom bolt connects to a positive lead, and the housing tab connects to a negative lead. Current flows through the isolated bolt, the spring arms, the outer rim of the heating element, the heating coil, the center bolt, and finally back to the negative terminal. The current is forced through the high-resistance coil due to a tiny gap insulated by a strip of paper, preventing it from taking a shorter path.Detail: Heating elementA closer look at the heating element reveals its design. The coil, made of nickel-chromium alloy, is bonded to the surrounding shield on one end and the center bolt on the other. Each loop is oxidized, insulating it from adjacent loops and forcing the current to traverse the entire resistive filament.Pop-out mechanismThe spring clip, which holds the lighter in its depressed position and conveys current, has bimetallic arms with steel on the outer surface and copper on the inner surface. As the filament heats up, the arms warm up, causing the copper to expand faster than the steel. This expansion pushes the arms open, releasing the lighter. The coil spring then causes the handle to pop out, signaling that the lighter is ready.ConclusionThis entirely analog device, developed in the 1950s, showcases the ingenuity of efficient, low-cost design, capable of being manufactured by the millions without any digital control.You can explore these scans yourself in the Voyager. If you’d like to learn more about industrial X-ray CT technology and how engineers use it to improve everything from running shoes to medical devices, check out our introductory video or reach out to our team.

Design to Reality

How I Think About R&D (and Turning Ideas Into Products)

R&D in a startup is not a separate function. It’s an integral part of the product development process, especially in the early stages when requirements are uncertain, the solution is unclear, and the risk is high. At Lumafield, I’ve worked on everything from early prototypes to complete product features like offset scanning and calibration systems. Over time, I’ve learned that effective R&D is not about having a perfect process. It is about thinking clearly, experimenting deliberately, and staying grounded in first principles. Here’s how I approach the work. 1. Start with first principles When tackling a new technical problem, I begin by reducing it to the fundamentals: physics, geometry, mechanical constraints. Early on, you often cannot rely on precedent. You need to understand what is objectively true and work forward from there. This mindset helped us build scanning capabilities when we were still new to tomography. We didn’t import solutions from other companies. Instead, we reasoned through the challenges ourselves. This took more effort up front but allowed us to invent solutions that fit our specific needs and constraints. 2. Prototype to learn In the early stages of product development, the purpose of a prototype is not to impress. It is to test a hypothesis. A prototype should reduce uncertainty. Can we hit the resolution target? Will the calibration approach scale? Can we build this cost-effectively? Sometimes the result is positive. Sometimes not. Either way, it moves the work forward. The key is to be clear about what you are trying to prove and avoid refining the details too early. 3. Use literature to build smarter and faster We often begin with a literature review to understand the problem space. Research papers can clarify what has already been done, what techniques are available, and where current limitations exist. This helps frame our approach. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. When researchers have already solved part of a problem or developed a method that fits into our pipeline, we use it. Applying proven components can accelerate development and avoid unnecessary work. However, most published research is not optimized for product integration. Methods may assume ideal conditions, ignore cost constraints, or require infrastructure that is not practical in our environment. That is where adaptation comes in. We borrow selectively, simplify when possible, and focus on what works reliably within our system. Understanding the principles behind a solution is more valuable than reproducing every detail. Our goal is not to replicate research but to apply it thoughtfully to build products that perform in the real world. 4. Align R&D with product outcomes Our work is driven by product needs. Sometimes a request comes from the product team or a customer. Other times, we explore an internal idea that we believe could unlock value. In both cases, we scope experiments tightly. We aim to answer key questions within a few days or weeks. This helps us avoid chasing technically interesting ideas that do not translate into real product improvements. If a solution is imperfect but solves the problem in a useful way, that is often enough. 5. Focus on what customers actually need In many cases, product requirements aren’t fixed. Customers may request specific performance targets, but in practice their needs are more flexible. We’ve tested configurations that technically fall short of a stated requirement. Yet the results were good enough that the customer was satisfied, and even impressed. Part of product development is figuring out where precision matters and where it doesn’t. That doesn’t mean lowering the bar. It means delivering meaningful outcomes based on real constraints. At Lumafield, we’re making advanced analysis software so accessible that you can even access our 3D CT scans on your phone. 6. Collaborate across functions R&D is rarely isolated. We work closely with teams across the company—engineering, product, customer success—to connect our experiments to real problems. Sometimes we initiate new product ideas. Other times, we help refine or extend features that already exist. In both cases, collaboration is critical. It ensures we’re not solving problems in a vacuum and helps us integrate what we build into the broader system. At a startup, where responsibilities overlap, this cross-functional alignment becomes even more important. 7. Tie research to real impact Good R&D demonstrates what’s possible, but great R&D leads to measurable improvements. For example, I’ve spent the past two years developing a new calibration method. The goal was not theoretical accuracy. It was to improve every scanner in the field with a software-only update. This opened new use cases, improved customer outcomes, and increased the value of our existing products. It’s easy to get lost in technical complexity. Staying focused on real product outcomes keeps the work grounded. 8. Tools help, but mindset matters more We use a range of tools. Cursor has helped me write software more efficiently. Mechanical prototyping tools let us test physical ideas quickly. These tools matter. But they’re not the deciding factor. What really drives R&D is the right mindset. Are you curious? Are you willing to test assumptions? Do you stay focused on solving the right problem? A thoughtful, iterative mindset will take you further than any single piece of software or hardware. Final thought R&D in a startup requires balancing speed, rigor, and practicality. You’re working with uncertainty. You’re building things that may not work. But you’re also learning quickly and making decisions that shape the final product. I have found that the most effective approach is to start from first principles, define clear questions, and work in tight feedback loops. You don’t need to be certain about everything. You just need to make consistent progress toward something real. That mindset (not just technical ability) is what moves a product from concept to reality.

The Quality Gap

How People Drive Quality

When people think about quality in manufacturing, they often think of documentation like certifications, processes, and forms. That stuff definitely matters, but it’s not the core of it. What really drives quality is people: how they work, how they think, and whether the system around them helps them succeed or sets them up to fail. That’s the lens I brought to Lumafield after working in medical devices, where the bar for quality is high, and for good reason. What Medical Devices Taught Me About Quality Before Lumafield, I worked in a highly regulated environment under ISO 13485, which is the quality standard for medical device manufacturers. In that world, trusting that someone made a good product isn’t enough; you have to prove it, every step of the way. What’s interesting about medical device manufacturing is that it doesn’t control the certification of the individuals designing a product, like the certified PE (Professional Engineers) in civil engineering. Technically, anyone can sketch out a medical device. What the certification does control is how that product gets built and tested. That means heavy documentation: from ideation and risk analysis, to design verification and validation, to production release and traceability. Every requirement needs to be documented, and every product needs to be tested against those requirements, with a full paper trail to back it up. I spent a lot of time in that system, and while some parts felt rigid, it also taught me how robust a good quality system can be. Every step exists to build confidence, minimize risk, and create repeatability. That experience gave me a foundation for how I think about quality now, even in a startup where we don’t have formal certifications (yet). What Quality Looks Like at a Startup At Lumafield, we’ve had to figure out what quality means without that external structure. We go beyond the safety standards our product is certified for, despite it not being required. Because even without a certifying body breathing down our neck, we care about building reliable products, and we know that just “building it right the first time” doesn’t scale. So instead of a formal QMS, we rely on a culture where every individual with hands on our hardware cares about product quality, and we enable those individuals with practical implementations of the bread-and-butter tools of manufacturing: detailed work instructions, in-process checks, and a responsive NCR process. Our focus is always on improving quality where the action is happening, not somewhere buried deep in a stack of SOPs. We want our operators to have the tools and information they need to reliably build quality products safely. That sounds simple, but we’ve come a long way since we started. When I joined, there was no structure yet—no standard for how instructions were written, no consistent way to track build issues, no process for root cause analysis. We’ve built that all from the ground up. What We Catch, and When Ideally, we’d catch every problem before it gets to the floor. That’s the goal with things like first article inspections and incoming quality checks. But at this stage, with how lean our manufacturing team is, we’ve had to make strategic tradeoffs. We can’t inspect every part, so we need to take calculated risks on where it’s more efficient to catch issues later on the production line and where we need to spend the resources to catch issues upon receipt. It’s a burn rate we accept. We’ll pay a little more for extra parts or expedited shipping if it means we can stay flexible and move quickly to meet our customer’s needs. Eventually, that’ll change. As we scale, it’ll make more sense to increase our investment in prevention. But right now, we pick our battles. Some parts are high-risk or high-cost, and we’ll spend the time checking those. Others, we let go and monitor downstream. That balance will keep shifting as we grow, but our culture where everyone, every step of the way, is invested in making quality products will remain the bedrock of how we build our hardware. Helping Build Techs Check Their Work One thing we’re pushing on with Triton is giving our build techs the ability to check their own work earlier. Right now, they’re really good at understanding how parts go together, because good mechanical design communicates that on its own. But when we get into more complex subsystems, like motion platforms wrapped in shielding and packed into tight spaces, things get murky. If it doesn’t work at the end, there are too many places to look. Instead of having our technicians blindly checking off items on a list, we’re building in subsystem testing to enable them to “check their own work” and learn from their mistakes. If we can test a motion platform before it’s wrapped up in the system, we isolate any issues and fix them while things are still accessible. It’s a huge time saver, and it makes debugging much more predictable. Designing Quality In The biggest factor that enables us to take this practical approach to quality is the thought that goes into the design of our hardware products. As Murphy’s Law states “if something can go wrong, it will”. In hardware that means if a part can be installed incorrectly, it will be installed incorrectly. It’s just a matter of time. That means the right move is to design the part so that incorrect isn’t possible. That may sound like just common sense, but it’s actually a core principle in any good quality system. At Lumafield, our hardware engineers live this mantra by heavily prioritizing getting hands-on with what they design. They’re on the floor turning wrenches, seeing what’s intuitive and what isn’t, and quickly making improvements. That feedback loop is gold. It mitigates all but the most manageable risks so that our manufacturing team is set up for success. It allows us to continue manufacturing consistent products as the people and the production environment change. Systems, Not Just Screws At Lumafield, we’re building scanners. But more importantly, we’re building the system that builds the scanners, and it’s a system that will have to scale, adapt, and improve over time. That’s why we’re hiring more manufacturing engineers now. Not to turn screws, but to support the whole process: the practical tools and the problem-solving systems that make it possible to build the same thing well, over and over. That’s what quality really is. Compliance and control are just the beginning. What matters most is taking pride in the little things that bring joy to your customers. It’s about making right-sized solutions so those on the front lines can do their jobs well and get better over time. All too often, manufacturing teams lose sight of this; getting the paperwork/documentation right starts to overshadow getting the product right. Only through thoughtful systems, good design, and people who care can you consistently deliver quality to your customers.

From The Floor

How to Read a Plastic Bottle

If you’ve ever picked up a water bottle and noticed the little numbers, symbols, or codes stamped into the plastic, you’ve already seen the secret language of packaging. Most people don’t realize it, but every mark on that bottle tells a story about where and how it was made. I spent years as an R&D and design engineer at Niagara Bottling, one of the largest vertically integrated beverage manufacturers in North America. We made everything in-house, “from pellets to pallets,” as we used to say. Once you’ve worked inside that process, you start seeing the manufactured world differently. You learn to read the bottles (and even some other products) around you. Plastic recycling symbols explained Let’s start with the biggest misconception: that little triangle made of arrows with a number inside it. Most people think it means the package is recyclable. It doesn’t. That symbol is called a Resin Identification Code, and all it tells you is what type of plastic the product is made from. A “1” means PET (polyethylene terephthalate), which is what nearly every water and soda bottle is made of. “2” means HDPE, often used for caps, milk jugs and detergent bottles. “5” is polypropylene, the material behind many yogurt cups and cream cheese containers. None of these numbers guarantee recyclability. Whether a bottle is actually recycled depends far more on local infrastructure than on the material itself. The chasing arrows were originally meant for manufacturers, not consumers. Somewhere along the way, they were mistaken for a promise instead of an ingredient label. Deciphering manufacturing codes If you flip a bottle over, you’ll usually find other small numbers and marks near the base. Each one corresponds to a step in the manufacturing process. At Niagara, we started with resin pellets, injection-molded them into preforms, blow-molded those into bottles, filled and capped them, shrink-wrapped the cases, and palletized them for shipping—all in one continuous process. The mold number identifies which cavity in a multi-cavity mold produced that particular bottle, for example cavity number 44 out of 96. If a defect ever shows up, the production team can trace it back to the exact mold that caused it. Every plastic bottle includes information about its manufacturer, material, and exact location of its making. You might also see a small logo or symbol from the equipment manufacturer or a co-packer who blew the bottle before it was filled. In vertically integrated companies like Niagara, that all happens under one roof, but many beverage brands outsource to partners who make bottles in one place and fill them somewhere else. The printed date and lot codes near the neck or label are part of the same traceability system. They let a company track every unit back to a specific line, shift, and time. If there’s ever a contamination issue or recall, those codes are how you identify which batches to pull from shelves. Inside PET bottle design A bottle’s design is its own kind of language. The features you can see, and the ones you can’t, tell you what that package was designed to withstand. Those faint seam lines running up the sides show where the two halves of the blow mold met. The tiny rough circle in the center of the base is called the gate mark, where molten PET entered the preform during injection molding. The neck ring, the rigid ring just below the cap threads, is what allows the preform to be handled through the production line before being blown into shape. If you look closely, you can sometimes see knife marks or scuffs from the gripping tooling that carried it. PET plastic bottles bear the traces of being injection-blow-molded with thinner walls indicating seam lines on the mold. Once you learn to recognize these, you can tell not just how a bottle was made, but how many times it has been handled, where the most stress lives, and which design choices were made for automation versus performance. Why bottles look the way they do Nothing in a modern bottle is purely aesthetic. Every ridge, curve, and indentation has a purpose. The label panel, for instance, often sits between raised “bumpers.” Those protect the label from friction as bottles move across filling lines at thousands of units per minute. The five-petal base (called a petaloid) distributes pressure evenly for carbonated beverages. Earlier water bottles sometimes reused the same carbonated mold bases, which is why the original Aquafina bottles just looked like Pepsi bottles. Each bottle’s shape reflects its function: ribs for strength, panels for efficiency, curves for grip, and round bases for pressure resistance. In hot-fill products like juice or sports drinks like Gatorade, you’ll see rectangular side panels that can flex inward as the bottle cools, preventing it from collapsing unevenly. Engineers call these intentional deformation zones that are built to move in predictable ways. Caps and closures As someone who has worked on closures, I can tell you the cap might be the most over-engineered part of the whole bottle. It has to create a perfect seal, apply evenly during high-speed capping, stay child-safe and tamper-evident, and be removable by anyone from a kid to a senior. That’s why you’ll notice larger caps on products like juice or apple sauce packets because they’re easier to grip and twist, even if they use more plastic. Look closely and you might see letters like “CSI” or a crown icon on the top, in addition to a mold number, just like the preforms and bottles. That is the cap manufacturer, not the brand. Companies such as CSI or Crown Holdings specialize in closures, and their marks show which supplier’s tooling was used. The future of packaging After decades of lightweighting and process optimization, we’re approaching the physical limits of how thin and efficient a PET bottle can be. The next big steps probably will not come from redesigning bottles but from improving recycling infrastructure and supply chain circularity. New materials such as bioplastics sound promising, but they introduce trade-offs like limited shelf life, degradation during storage, or contamination in existing recycling streams. Until those challenges are solved, the smartest improvements may come from better systems rather than different chemistries. People think packaging is simple just because it’s disposable. But the opposite is true. A plastic bottle represents one of the most refined pieces of everyday engineering. Every ridge, mark, and number testifies to a problem solved. You just have to know where to look.

From The Floor

Inside a 12‑Month Sprint from Concept to Factory‑Ready Product

From The Floor

Manufacturing in 2026: Less Disruption, More Discipline

Materials World

Materials That Make or Break a Shoe

When I first started cutting shoes in half, I thought quality was just about what you get for your money. Do you get higher quality materials or not? But once I started learning more about barefoot shoes, I realized that there’s more to comfort than just materials. The shape of the last matters. Fit matters. There’s so much more to it than meets the eye.Quality is a multifaceted thing. Materials, aesthetic, and fit are indispensable elements of it, but the way you use the shoes is what puts quality to the test. You have to gather as much information as possible to find the right shoe for your needs. Do you have wide feet? Then you need a wide shoe. Are you doing heavy duty work? You need something durable enough for that. Winter? You need insulation and grip. The problem is that most people don’t even know what’s inside footwear unless you literally cut it in half.Myths about brands and countriesI run a YouTube channel called Rose Anvil, where I cut shoes and boots in half to learn about their construction. What started as just wanting to understand why some boots last decades and others fall apart in months has turned into hundreds of detailed teardowns. I’ve cut open more than 500 pairs, from luxury brands to bargain-bin imports, and what I’ve found along the way has changed how I think about quality, value, and the way things are made.“Over the last 500 pairs of shoes I’ve cut open, I’ve seen how older brands that get bought and sold over and over end up strip-mining all the value.”One of the biggest misconceptions of footwear manufacturing is that brands with long histories are automatically better. Over the last 500 pairs of shoes I’ve cut open, I’ve seen how older brands that get bought and sold over and over end up strip-mining all the value. They squeeze margins to pay off the business deal and the end consumer foots the bill.A craftsman stitches the upper of a leather boot, guiding each curve by hand to ensure strength, precision, and a perfect fit.Same with countries. Many people automatically assume that everything made in China is garbage. But look at Grant Stone. They produce some of the highest quality footwear in the world, and it’s made in China. On the other side, you’ve got the $10 boots you see on Temu, where you don’t even know what will show up. Is that China’s fault, or is that because people want to buy something for $5 that should cost $50?“The factory will build to whatever standard the brand sets.”It’s easy to blame where something’s made, but the truth usually comes down to choices made higher up. The factory will build to whatever standard the brand sets. When Dr. Martens moved most of their production out of England, people were right to complain. The quality dropped. But that wasn’t because the factories overseas couldn’t make them well. It was because the company told those factories to make cheaper boots to boost margins. They could have kept the same quality at a lower price, but they chose not to.Reading leather without cutting itMany people ask me how to assess the quality of leather. Here are a few signs you can look for. If you can see the raw edge, look at the fibers. Toward the top, closer to the smooth surface, the fibers should get really fine, almost solid. That means the grain is intact, which is the most sought-after part of leather. It looks smooth, but it’s also really strong because it binds all the looser suede fibers together.“As a general rule, the more real leather you see in footwear, the higher the quality.”Feel matters too. If leather feels foamy, dry, or like it could crack and fall apart, that’s obviously not a positive sign. If it feels almost wet to the touch or like it has conditioner or oil in it, that usually means they went the extra mile in finishing. As a general rule, the more real leather you see in footwear, the higher the quality. Rose Anvil x White’s Sundance Boot updates the classic Packer with a lighter build, high arch, and hand-sewn stitchdown craftsmanship made in Spokane, Washington.Pigskin is an interesting use case. It’s thinner than cowhide, but has a tighter fiber structure and big pores. Sometimes the pores even go all the way through. That makes it breathable and strong in thinner cuts. You can make an unlined pigskin boot that’s lightweight, durable, and breathable in a way you can’t with cowhide. The downside is the hides are smaller and supply is limited, so it’s ultimately harder to work with.Materials that fail and materials that lastEveryone has probably worn through the inside heel of a shoe. That’s one of the most common failure points. Higher-quality boots often have a suede or roughout leather cover inside the heel. It grips better, molds to your heel, and resists abrasion.Underfoot tells another story. For centuries people stood on leather midsoles. Leather shapes to your foot, absorbs sweat, and doesn’t smell as much. It’s also expensive and firmer than foams, which is why rubber and foams have taken over. Foams are cheaper, softer right away, but they don’t last as long.If you pull the insole and look underneath, you’ll see what you’re really standing on. Is it leather, fiberboard, or just thin fabric? That’s an excellent indicator of the lifespan you can expect from a shoe.Buying smarter with materials in mindDon’t trust the brand name alone. Feel the shoe for yourself. Look at it closely. Compare it to other shoes at the same price point. There is a minimum buyable product. If you’re buying footwear under $40, or boots under $100, something has to give. The quality will be poor enough that it likely will fall apart fast. In the long run, people often spend more replacing cheap footwear than they would by buying one decent pair. If you’re on a budget, you’re better off getting a used pair of higher-quality boots than a brand new $40 pair.“When cheap materials fail, you pay for it twice: once when the shoe breaks and again when you replace it.”People sometimes argue that spending more is just about fashion or image, but footwear really is a tool. Shoes are the equipment that get you from point A to point B, that keep you working, and that carry all of your body weight every day. When cheap materials fail, you pay for it twice: once when the shoe breaks and again when you replace it. Better materials may cost more upfront, but they save you money, time, and frustration.How it changed the way I buyGood shoes balance health, quality, story, and style. You wear them every day. Shoes are the one thing separating you from the ground. All of your weight rests on them. That means materials matter.“I want to support brands that still care about craft, not the ones that have been bought and sold until they’re just a shadow of what they were.”As a consumer, I’ve become picky with my choice of shoes. I want to support brands that still care about craft, not the ones that have been bought and sold until they’re just a shadow of what they were. I like finding footwear with a story behind it. It becomes a conversation piece, and it makes the experience of wearing them more enjoyable.This industrial CT scan of a Japanese M98 boot from World War II reveals its internal stitching, layers, and sole construction without needing to cut it in half.I’ve also changed for health reasons. Barefoot shoes, wide toe boxes, zero drop are all design choices that make you realize that shoes should actually be shaped like feet. Once you wear wider shoes for a while, putting on a narrow pair feels terrible.We spend all this time worrying about posture in chairs. Shoes deserve at least as much attention. They’re the foundation for our movement through the world.

Recall Radar

Parts Under Pressure

Design to Reality

Pulling the Thread on Talenti’s Stubborn Lids

Talenti ice cream pints are notorious for how hard they can be to open. The subject of countless articles and forum posts, people have shared tips and tricks for reaching the sweet treat inside. Talenti itself has recognized the challenge their iconic plastic packaging can pose, releasing the Talenti Twist in May 2025 to aid with lid opening. That plastic shrinks when cold is widely identified as a reason the lids clutch the clear tubs so tightly, and letting the package warm up is known to help. But we wanted to take a closer look at the packaging to see if there were any aspects of the design that might explain what makes these tubs so exceptionally frustrating. Armed with our Neptune industrial X-ray CT scanner, we bought a couple of tubs of Talenti from our local grocery store to see what we could find. Scans of Talenti Alphonso Mango Sorbetto and Mediterranean Mint Gelato What our CT scans revealed We conducted 30-minute scans of the tubs in our Neptune, keeping the scans on the shorter side to prevent excessive melting of the gelato inside. CT scans provide a full 3D view of the interior of a product, allowing us to slice into our virtual model in any direction. This lets us take a look at how the threads of the lid and tub actually engage. Corner cutouts of the threads on the Mint and Mango Talenti tubs. We’ve scanned a lot of rigid plastic packaging at Lumafield, and at a first glance the threads on the tub appear sharper than what we usually see. A closer look lets us fully appreciate how narrow–and frankly rather pointy–the threads are. Close-ups of the threads engaging on the two jars. How Talenti compares to other packaging To validate this opinion, we scanned several other similarly-sized plastic containers. Talenti’s plastic packaging is unique among grocery store ice cream, and we were unable to source a similarly frozen comparison. But we procured and scanned a tub of refrigerated pickles, a jar of mayonnaise, and a container of grated parmesan cheese. All of these items have wide mouths, as opposed to bottles that taper into a narrow neck at the top. Assorted plastic tub packaging with close-ups of the threads. Note that the pickle tub was leaking, so brine is visible between the threads. The threads look significantly different. On the grated cheese and mayonnaise packaging, the threads are about the same thickness as the rest of the packaging wall, affording them some flexibility. The pickle tub threads are solid, like the Talenti threads, but much rounder. We can also observe that the Talenti threads are more deeply engaged, the point of the tub thread sitting relatively high on the cap thread. On the other packages, the threads appear to make softer contact. Some of that could come from plastic shrinkage due to freezing, but the sharper shape of the threads seems to make the problem worse. The shape of the problem: thread geometry The threads on the Talenti tub seem to more closely resemble what you’d find on a narrow-mouth rigid plastic container, like the water, ketchup, and soda bottles in the example below. CT cross-sections of a water bottle, ketchup, and soda cap assembly. Even when we compare Talenti to the closest comparison we found–the pickle tub and the soda bottle–the Talenti threads look pointier, for lack of a better word. While the pickle and soda container threads are blunted, the Talenti thread almost seems to be clawing itself into the lid. Thus, thread shape seems a plausible suspect for what makes these lids so stubborn. Close-ups of the thread engagements for the pickle tub, Talenti tub, and soda bottle. Over-torquing on the line Another possible cause is over-torque. Anecdotally, the lids felt easier to remove after the first opening. Back in 2022, Talenti acknowledged an issue in their production line that caused lids to be screwed on too tightly, which they subsequently solved. However, that may have been an extreme case, and the assembly of the lid onto the tub could still cause challenges. We scanned the Talenti tubs before and after opening to see whether that told us anything. Cross sections of the Mango Sorbetto, before and after the first lid opening. Like the new tubs, we scanned the opened tubs for 30 minutes as well. The gelato spent several hours in the freezer in between scans to restore its frozen state. The air bubbles in the sorbetto (and the chocolate chips in the mint) held their positions well enough that we could align on the same locations in the threads across scans. Digging deeper into the scans Examining a closely cropped segment of the thread engagement, it appears the threads are making less contact post-opening. This certainly an imperfect experiment dependent on our personal grip strengths. But we tightened the cap back on as best we could and the CT scan does show that the tub is sealed. A 3D detailed view of the thread engagements on the Mango Sorbetto, before and after opening/re-closing. When we examine the intersection as a 2D slice, we can measure a roughly 14% difference in contact amount between the new and previously opened containers. The scan is a bit rough, given the short duration and presence of ice, but the measurement does suggest that the line machine may be over-tightening the lid. It is also possible that the threads round out as the lid is used, or as the threads are damaged. One of the most popular Reddit recommendations for opening the gelato is to trace the inside of the lid with a butter knife. This could potentially dull the threads and account for why the hack is so effective. 2D slices of the intersection of the lid and tub threads. Why the lids remain viral We cannot say with certainty what makes Talenti jars so hard to open. Our sample size was limited, and we kept scans short to avoid melting, which added noise. What ultimately stands out most to us are the clear visible differences in thread design, compared with other similarly-sized plastic food packaging. It’s also notable that no other major ice cream brands use similar packaging. The other ice creams we encountered when looking for comparisons use either cardboard cartons, or, for larger containers, plastic tubs with lids that peel off sans threads. Most likely, it’s a confluence of factors—thread geometry, closure torque, and cold—that keeps this problem going viral. At a high level, it’s a reminder that small design choices compound into the user experience people remember. But, when the gelato is so good, we’ll wrestle with the lids anyways.

Recall Radar

Routine Uses, Real Risks

This month’s recalls cluster where products meet ordinary use, from small appliances that try to hold heat and pressure with too little margin to children’s items that expose compartments or shed parts under routine handling. Bikes and youth machines depend on bolts, bushings, and clearances that must carry real loads, and furniture and rails at home show how geometry decides whether heavy pieces stay put. On the road, software fixes shaped outcomes as much as parts, with updates correcting behavior without new hardware. The broader trend centers on everyday safety, with containment, stability, and current software separating routine use from real risk. Energy edge cases Portable power and small burners failed for the same reason, compact designs that leave little room for heat or pressure to go. INIU’s recall of about 210,000 power banks shows how dense cells and modest protection electronics can trap heat until it escapes the design. Walmart’s Ozark Trail tabletop butane stoves follow the same physics in metal, where a compact burner gives pressure few safe paths when something drifts. McLee Creations’ MyOnlyStyler hair dryer fails a different gate by omitting immersion protection, turning a routine bathroom drop into a shock hazard. In all three, safe behavior depends on giving heat, pressure, and current clear exits that still work after real handling. Clustered failures, common causes Two VEVOR-branded appliances imported by Sanven Technology were recalled this month, a pattern that often points to weak process controls somewhere in the supply chain or at final assembly. The ice crusher can enter a thermal event and ignite, which suggests heat generation and containment slipped outside safe bounds. The handheld steamer leaks or spits hot water, and its cap can come off during use, which shows sealing and retention that do not hold once the system warms and pressurizes. One recall can be a bad run, but clusters from one maker often reflect process failures rather than a single defect. High-speed debris Workshops and backyards told the same story about control. Grizzly Industrial’s heavy-duty planers can let the chip breaker touch the cutterhead, a small miss at the cutting gap that turns chips into high-speed projectiles. Primark’s hand water-balloon pumps fail from the opposite direction, where pressure rises inside a simple body without a defined outlet and the product can rupture. The common risk is unmanaged energy in close quarters, with operators standing exactly in its path. Household hardware Furniture and rails sit inches from people and carry real mass. Casaottima’s thirteen-drawer dressers violate the clothing storage standard and can tip if left unanchored. Two adult bed-rail campaigns, one from Vivohome and another from KingPavonini, point to gaps that can trap a person between rail and mattress. Ningbo Tianqi’s FUFU&GAGA Murphy beds add a reminder that a 215-pound frame can drop during assembly or disassembly if it is not restrained. The danger comes from size and proximity, where a small change in geometry can turn everyday movement into leverage against the body. Child-scale tolerances Children’s products clustered around small-parts access and basic stability. KTEBO’s writing tablet toys expose button cells when the compartment screw does not stay attached. CreateOn’s Pip-Cubes can release high-powered magnets if seams open, turning a drop into an internal puncture risk when magnets meet across tissue. HydroJug’s fourteen-ounce tumblers can shed handle rivets and add a choking hazard, and Primark’s Little Bear soother clips can lose a wooden button and expose a sharp screw. A separate thread ran through sleep products from multiple sellers, including Sofoliana and Glotika from Bosen US, Macardac, and Alinux from Winkids, where low sidewalls and oversized foot openings leave infants vulnerable and no stand prevents falls from elevated surfaces. These items live in kitchens, bathrooms, and nurseries with constant handling and cleaning, so safety comes from closures that stay captive and shapes that keep their limits after real wear. When play becomes serious When wheels start turning, small joints carry the load. Outdoor Master’s children’s and youth helmets fail positional stability and coverage, so a routine crash can land as head impact without the protection the standard requires. Luyuan’s youth ATVs miss the federal ATV suspension standard and add handlebars that can cut on impact. Different products share the same setting, a driveway or trail where forces rise quickly, and small lapses in retention or coverage can turn ordinary motion into injury. Software that drives hardware Vehicle recalls closed the month with a different kind of interface, one where code governs behavior as directly as hardware. Ram’s 2025 and 2026 pickups can lose the instrument cluster to a software fault, removing required brake and shift indications. KTM and Husqvarna’s 390 and 401 lines show a related control issue, with engines that can stall at low rpm until dealers update the controller. Waymo addressed an Automated Driving System behavior that could pass a stopped school bus, and the fleet fix was in place by mid-November. The hardware stayed in place while risk shifted with software version and configuration. Remediation comes with revised loads rather than new parts, which puts software control and validation at the center of road safety. Takeaways Together these recalls point to ordinary conditions rather than edge cases. Heat, pressure, and motion build inside compact products, and small gaps or loose fasteners decide whether that energy stays contained. Furniture and shop equipment show how mass and proximity turn minor errors into harm, while the vehicle campaigns show risk shifting with software even when hardware stays put. What matters is routine discipline in design and upkeep, with clear paths for heat and pressure, fasteners that stay captive, stability that resists tipping, and software that reflects a current, validated build. That is the line between ordinary use and avoidable harm.

Recall Radar

Stored Energy Meets Soft Spots

From The Floor

The Missing Middle in Battery Manufacturing

When I talk with small businesses, startups, and big OEMs working on batteries, I hear the same story. On one side, there are labs making tens of cells by hand in glove boxes, with careful notes and plenty of craft. That effort can signal feasibility but rarely convinces a VP or investor who needs scalability and repeatability. On the other side, there are lines turning out tens of thousands of cells a day, locked to one product and one recipe. They won’t pause so a small program can run a few hundred cells of five slight variants. The useful ground in the middle is missing. Teams need a way to make hundreds of consistent cells quickly, trace exactly what went into them, and repeat runs after tweaking a single variable. Right now that means bending someone else’s operation out of shape and learning with thin evidence. The team at the Carolina Institute for Battery Innovation (CIBI) at the University of South Carolina (USC) discovered this through open discussions with people across the battery landscape as well as surveys of possible users and other universities and contract facilities. Some universities cover parts of the need but are oversubscribed. Contract plants excel once you know exactly what you want, but they aren’t built for the early, messy questions. This leads to projects leaping from coin cells to full production assumptions, then stalling when real-cell behavior diverges. By the time teams chase large-scale capacity, they’ve often already made costly decisions on ambiguous data. Cylindrical cells set for small pack integration and testing in Prof. Austin Downey’s lab at the University of South Carolina. What engineers actually need When a team asks for a pilot run, they don’t want (or need) a mini gigafactory. They want to keep most variables steady, change only one knob, and walk away with data they can defend in a room where people can say no. They want their engineers on the floor next to ours so the learning isn’t third-hand. They want cells and datasets to travel together so that six months later, a voltage plateau or rise in impedance still maps to a specific weld head, slurry lot, or dry-room dew point. Trust comes from pragmatic traceability. No one needs a full battery passport for early R&D. They need to record which coating lot ran on which web, the calendaring target, the weld-head parameters, and the formation protocol. That’s enough metadata to explain performance, but not so much that analysis becomes the job. Format choice matters. Five- to ten-amp-hour pouch cells expose thermal and mechanical realities without the risk profile of very large cells. Tabs, seals, and stack pressure behave like they do in production, but a mistake won’t shut down the line for a month. From there, many programs step to 18650 or 21700: big enough to matter, small enough to manage, and aligned with industry direction. Dr. Shichen Sun in Prof. Kevin Huang’s lab analyzing new characterization data. Victoria Colon-Laborde and Kyra Barton in Prof. Goli Jalilvand’s lab inspecting punched components for making coin cells for proof-of-concept tests with a partner. Ms. Belinda Agamah in Prof. William Mustain’s lab punching electrodes for Si-anode battery testing. Constraints that shape the work University lines can log data around the clock, but when you’re changing recipes daily, a full MES only slows you down. As we are building the capabilities in CIBI, we are mindful to stay at the pre-A/A level of technology validation, not mass-production PPAP, so our quality system matches our intent. We will barcode every cell and record only the critical variables like coating lot, calendaring target, weld parameters, formation profile. That way, we will always know what changed without drowning in metadata. Metrology earns its place: if a measurement doesn’t alter a decision, we won’t collect it. That lean traceability drives our turn to X-ray CT. Rather than scan every cell, we ask early experiments where CT delivers the biggest payoff—post-stack alignment, weld-head integrity, or post-formation defects—and then deploy it as a decision lever. CT reveals subsurface voids, misalignment, or coating delamination that electrical tests alone can’t catch. By targeting scans where they expose hidden failure modes, we turn images into same-day adjustments and avoid metrology for its own sake. Good data plumbing ties it all together: every plot still maps to a coating lot, web ID, or formation profile without detective work. Where teams stumble Most early projects succeed or fail on materials integration. A partner ships a new powder or separator. You mix, coat, dry, calendar, and slit. Everything looks fine—until a weld or seal reveals a sensitivity invisible in coin cells. A powder that behaves well in small batches may fail when exposed to production solvents, drying curves, or pressure. A separator tolerant of one weld energy may buckle at another. Small process changes can break lifetime. Running mixing → coating → drying → calendaring → slitting → assembly → welding → sealing → formation as a coherent sequence surfaces those sensitivities quickly and in context. If a dataset flags a high tab-weld void rate correlating to rising formation resistance, you adjust the weld head that day—not debate slides weeks later. Data trips teams up too. Spreadsheets multiply, copies diverge, and folders labeled “final” fill with versions. Months later, no one can reproduce the figure that justified the next phase. Design for the human who reviews the data: decide what to collect, make it mandatory, and keep it close to the work. The aim isn’t pretty dashboards; it’s a clear decision someone can trust. Assembling samples for structural battery testing in Prof. Ralph White’s lab. A practical pilot, not a mini-factory There is real demand for a trusted middle ground. Some academics excel at mechanism studies and new materials—work that happens in my research lab and those around USC, which I respect deeply. But, as we are building CIBI, we are drawn to what happens in real cells under real operating conditions, and to building teams and infrastructure so more people can do that work well. We are standing up a pilot line in the Southeast United States for that middle ground. We’ll begin with 5–10 Ah pouch cells (operational in Q4 2026) because that’s where demand is strongest and where we learn fastest without splitting focus. Tabs, seals, and thermal behavior reveal themselves early enough to guide changes with manageable risk. About 6 months later, we will bring production of 21700 cylindrical cells online. That sequence reflects input from safety consortia, internal experience, and government R&D programs. 21700 hits a Goldilocks zone—large enough for meaningful energy-density and thermal studies, small enough to avoid the safety and capital burdens of very large formats. Wide view of students and postdoc’s in Prof. Goli Jalilvand’s lab. Includes pouch cell assembly, using the in-situ Raman and preparing samples for various testing. Three Engagement Patterns Make to recipe. You provide a bill of materials and process windows. We will assemble, form, and test to spec, then return finished cells and a clean dataset. Think of it as “make 300 cells with this conductive cathode additive exactly as written.” The value lies not in the machine list, but in data and cells that agree and can be defended. Design of experiments. We codevelop a matrix—say, anode additive vs. multiple electrolytes—execute builds, handle formation and testing, and deliver results in a format your analysis stack ingests. The aim is clarity: if an additive works only at certain solvent ratios, you see it on one page, not buried across files. Longer R&D partnerships. Over a semester we plan three or four build cycles, layer in physical characterization and failure analysis, and coauthor decisions that turn ideas into IP. This is where CT, cross-sections, and simple mechanical tests converge. A weld fix shows up in resistance data and images, not just in meeting minutes. For data stewardship, we formalize capture, curation, and handoff so results stay useful across iterations. Engagements run days to weeks. Engineers work side by side in the assembly process. Our target remains pre-A and A cells for technology validation. Every cell gets a barcode. Lots and critical settings are tracked. We define capture, curation, and handoff up front so that months later, explanations still link performance back to process variables. If this middle ground sounds familiar, bring your engineers and open questions. We’ll bring a line built for learning and the discipline to keep evidence clean. What motivates the CIBI faculty and staff is being the trusted partner that moves ideas out of the glove box and into real cells. It is gratifying to see a company come in with a hunch and leave with evidence they can act on. Rendering by designers at Little Diversified Architectural Consulting in North Charleston, SC of Phase 2 of the Carolina Institute of Battery Innovation (CIBI), planned for 2028. CIBI’s vision is to become a collaborative ecosystem with university and industry researchers, with 100,000 sq ft. of dedicated battery space, pilot manufacturing for pouch, cylindrical, and prismatic formats, a world-class battery safety lab, and a large battery cycling/performance lab.

From The Floor

The Secret to Better Running Shoes? CT Scanning

When it comes to running, comfort is king. A shoe that doesn’t fit just right—whether it’s too tight, too loose, or blister-inducing—can mean the difference between a personal best and a painful run. But creating a shoe that delivers comfort, durability, and performance at scale is a challenge when so much of its structure is hidden from view.For Luca Ciccone, Director of Product Engineering at Saucony, understanding a shoe’s structure has always been as important as its materials. Industrial CT presented a new way to do just that—offering insights that traditional inspection methods simply couldn’t. When Saucony began working with Lumafield’s Neptune CT scanner, it quickly became an essential tool in their development process. Now, their engineers can examine every layer of a shoe without cutting it apart, allowing them to spot hidden flaws, ensure consistency, and fine-tune designs before they ever hit the production line.CT scanning isn’t just for elite racing shoes; it’s a tool that improves footwear for every kind of runner. That’s why we sat down with Luca to take a look inside a comprehensive range of Saucony’s shoes, from the Omni 9, a stability-focused trainer for everyday wear, to the Ride 18, a cushioned workhorse built for long miles, and the Endorphin Elite 2, an elite marathon racing shoe.Comfort vs. PerformanceTo engineer a comfortable shoe, designers have to thread the needle between a reliable hard good and a comfortable soft good. That means looking at more than just materials and construction methods—it requires a deep understanding of how every individual component interacts with the rest of the shoe.Being able to see the CT scan and digitally cut the shoe in half to look at each one of the components and how everything came together, we can truly understand the consistency that we’re getting in our R&D phases, all the way up into production.‍That insight is crucial when working with intricate, multi-layered products like running shoes. Even a small misalignment—like a heel counter being placed slightly off-center—can change the way a shoe fits and feels. And because runners expect every pair to feel the same, maintaining consistency is just as important as getting the initial design right.“If it’s misaligned in any way, shape, or form, it can truly affect the comfort of the shoe and how it can perform,” Ciccone explained. “We want to make sure that we’re minimizing these risks upfront.”Saucony’s Omni 9While the Omni 9 may look like a casual, fashion-forward sneaker, there’s a surprising amount of engineering beneath the surface. The shoe is designed to provide both comfort and stability, but that balance depends on careful placement of key internal components.One of the most important of these is the heel counter—a rigid insert that helps lock the foot in place. Because it sits inside the shoe’s upper, it’s impossible to inspect without cutting the shoe open—unless you use CT scanning.“The first thing that I look at when I look at a CT scan of this particular shoe… is where the heel counter is being placed on the inside of the upper,” Ciccone notes. “You cannot see it from the outside, and the only way that you’re able to look at it is by cutting it in half.”With CT scanning, Saucony can go beyond simply verifying placement. Engineers can measure its exact position, assess alignment across different production batches, and ensure it maintains its shape under stress. This level of detail helps eliminate inconsistencies before they become comfort or performance issues, keeping every pair true to its intended design.Saucony’s Ride 18A great running shoe isn’t just comfortable on the first run—it has to feel just as good after hundreds of miles. That’s why the Ride 18 was designed with durability in mind. But materials alone aren’t enough to guarantee longevity; the way they’re assembled matters just as much.Sometimes, issues don’t appear right away. A runner might wear a pair of shoes for weeks before noticing that a certain spot feels less cushioned than it used to. These breakdowns are often caused by inconsistencies in glue application, foam density, or structural bonding—issues that aren’t visible from the outside.If you’re able to look at all of your products throughout testing, you can simply see where those breakdowns occur, and you’re able to fix the design down the road.‍Saucony’s Endorphin Elite 2Saucony's brand-new Endorphin Elite 2 is built for speed, and its performance hinges on the precise interaction of multiple components. At the heart of the shoe is a carbon-fiber plate sandwiched between layers of PWRRUN PB foam. This plate helps propel runners forward, but only if it’s positioned perfectly.Our scan of the Endorphin Elite 2 shows the way the foam and carbon plate have been bonded together. If there were any air pockets, inconsistencies, or shifts in placement, they would be visible in the scan—allowing the team to refine the process before production.CT scanning lets Saucony detect potential weak points before a shoe ever reaches a runner’s feet. By analyzing the bonding between the midsole and upper, the adhesion of different materials, and the uniformity of the foam, engineers can make adjustments that prevent premature wear and tear.The Future of FootwearCT scanning isn’t just a tool for defect detection—it’s a new way of thinking about product development. For Saucony, that means fewer prototypes, more reliable manufacturing, and better-performing shoes. Instead of relying on assumptions and best guesses, the team can use real-world data to make informed decisions at every stage of the design process.As engineers, we always strive to make our products better. Being able to look inside our shoes without cutting them apart—that’s a game-changer.‍From stability-focused trainers to elite racing shoes, every model in Saucony’s lineup benefits from precise, data-driven engineering. And thanks to Lumafield’s CT scanning technology, that engineering is more accurate, efficient, and effective than ever before.

Recall Radar

Tolerance Tested

This month’s recalls cut across a cross-section of everyday use. Spanning everything from batteries and bikes to children’s products and vehicles, the volume of recalls this month makes patterns easier to see. Read as a whole, the list reveals familiar failure modes under ordinary conditions where thermal margin disappears in tight packaging, interfaces shoulder more load than the spec anticipates, and small components drift out of tolerance and undermine system performance. Packed cells, thin margins November’s battery recalls span devices of every size. Belkin pulled portable power banks and wireless charging stands for pack overheating, about 83,500 units in the United States and 2,385 in Canada. Knog recalled bicycle lights for the same hazard at roughly 3,790 units. Overheating can start with variation in cell quality, defects introduced during cell or pack assembly, weak battery management systems, or integration choices that leave the pack without a clear thermal path. These products live in pockets, on nightstands, and on handlebars, so a single fault can turn into fire or toxic smoke in occupied space. Mechanisms on the move Mechanical limits surfaced in everyday gear, and the modes were not subtle. Lezyne bicycle floor pumps, about 7,500 in the United States and 680 in Canada, can launch the canister from its base under pressure, putting users and bystanders in the flight path. Spartan riding mowers leave room for steering arm dampers to be installed the wrong way on about 650 machines, a setup that produces bounce and loss of control. STIHL’s BR 800 backpack blowers add a rotating failure with fan wheels that can break apart on about 47,800 units and cause lacerations. The throughline is a single dependency at the point of action where a modest interface decides whether force is guided or let loose. Saddles under stress Peloton’s Original Series Bike+ returned to a familiar stress path. The seat post assembly can fracture under load, and about 833,000 bikes are included. In 2023, Peloton recalled the original Bike for the same basic failure mode, a larger campaign that covered roughly 2.2 million units. Taken together, the two actions show how repeated, off-axis riding loads concentrate at the saddle and post, and how small margins at that interface can scale into very large field populations. Tolerances for tiny users Child-focused recalls centered on restraint, retention, and access in ordinary play. AliExpress’s convertible strollers violated the stroller standard when the restraint system can fail. Only about 15 units are involved, yet child safety is judged by quality, not scale. Little Partners’ Grow ’N Stow folding learning tower reported platforms that can collapse across about 9,780 units. Konges Sløjd’s three-wheeled scooters can lose the left front wheel on roughly 50 units and turn balance into a sudden drop. Two toys raise ingestion and choking hazards, including Bettina doll sets that expose button cells on about 380 sets and Inkari plush alpaca toys for under-three use with eyes that can detach on about 64,000 units. Across these cases, safety depends on restraints, platforms, wheels, and small parts that remain secure through real handling rather than only in ideal tests. Strain on simple things Several household goods looked simple but carried real hazards. F&F Fine Wines recalled Kirkland Signature Valdobbiadene Prosecco DOCG for bottles that can break or shatter, about 941,400 bottles. H-E-B’s 12-pack Destination Holiday Glow bracelets include a green stick that can leak an irritant liquid, about 6,600 packs. Kroger’s Halloween-themed skeleton candles include flammable ornaments, about 3,680 units. Risk tracks variation, not complexity. Glass under pressure demands uniform walls, sealed chemistries depend on clean continuous bonds, and anything near a flame must use materials that do not ignite. Small failures, big consequences On the automotive side, recent recall campaigns focus on fuel containment, traction batteries, and braking electronics. Hyundai’s 2020–2023 Sonata and Kia’s 2021–2024 K5 cite a damaged check valve that can let air into the fuel tank, allow it to expand against hot exhaust components, and ultimately melt. Ford’s 2020–2024 Escape PHEV and 2021–2024 Lincoln Corsair PHEV list manufacturing defects in high-voltage cells that can short and fail. A separate action for certain 2025 Maverick and Escape vehicles points to an electric brake booster ECU cover that can overheat the circuit board and disable ABS, electronic stability control, traction control, or brake assist. Small parts carry big consequences on the road, and a single faulty valve, cell, or cover can put everyone nearby at risk. Takeaways November underscores that reliability lives at interfaces. Thermal margin around cells and chargers determines how quietly products age. Small joints carry outsized safety loads, from coaster hubs and pump canisters to seat posts and fan wheels. In children’s products, batteries and small parts must remain inaccessible after real wear, not just on day one. In vehicles and large systems, modest components shape outcomes for many people at once. The mix this month also shows that scale does not track complexity. A simple interface repeated across a product family can create a very large field count, while a small run in child gear still matters because the harm is concentrated. The pattern is consistent across categories and it points to the same place: the ordinary connections that decide how products behave when they leave the bench.

Recall Radar

Too Hot, Too Sharp, Too Loose

Design to Reality

What Are Counterfeit Batteries?

18650 lithium-ion batteries are among the most common in the world. Their wound design and standard form factor makes them fast and economical to produce at scale, with around 5 billion being manufactured every year. But the popularity and standardization of these cells creates an opportunity for bad actors to capitalize on the quality efforts of reputable manufacturers.Counterfeit 18650 cells move through fast-moving marketplaces where listings turn over quickly and a convincing external wrap substitutes for provenance. 18650s generally all look the same on the outside, given their defined can size of 18 mm by 65 mm. The truth, however, lies within, where the jelly roll reveals dangerous shortcuts.Counterfeit Technique 1: ImpersonationThe clearest counterfeiting comes from direct impersonation. Some 18650 products copy a specific, reputable model in name, appearance, and positioning. In our Battery Quality Report, we examined cells from Amazon vendor SOOCOOL that closely mimicked the appearance of Samsung’s 30Q 18650 product. The cells were wrapped in a strikingly similar pink color, and featured similar printed warnings advising against use in vaping devices. The listing title “Authentic 30QP Rechargeable 3.7 V 18650 Battery Flat Top, Real 3000mAh(2PCS, with Free Plastic Case),” also clearly leaned into the Samsung 30Q identity, and they were priced at a premium, costing more than the actual Samsung batteries but available on the more convenient platform of Amazon. This particular listing has since been removed, but countless others can still be found.The Amazon listing for the counterfeit 30Q cells from SOOCOOL. The listing has since been removed.Initially, the batteries also seem to perform similarly to the real Samsungs, their measured capacities landing in the same neighborhoods. However, our industrial X-ray CT scans told a different story. Anode overhang, which should sit near 0.5 mm to maintain a safety margin as the cell ages, came up short in several cells, with one sample even showing negative anode overhang. Insufficient anode overhang is a defect that can meaningfully contribute to uneven lithium plating, which in turn can result in performance problems and even internal shorts down the line. The edge alignment of the SOOCOOL cells also deviated wildly. Anode and cathode layers should be as straight as possible in a wound lithium-ion battery, and the wavy patterns of the SOOCOOL batteries indicate poor manufacturing process controls. The quality concerns that the CT scans surface confirm these cells are counterfeits.The color of the counterfeit cell is an obvious imitation of the actual Samsung.Counterfeit Technique 2: MisrepresentationLow-cost cells that print impossible specifications engage in a different kind of misrepresentation. Two brands in the set scanned for the Battery Quality Report, Benkia and Maxiaeon, had “9900 mAh” printed on their wraps, a physically impossible figure for the form factor. The measured capacity for the both brands sat around 1200 mAh, and the scans showed why. Large portions of the interior had little or no active material. These cells do not impersonate a particular brand, but they inflate performance claims beyond plausibility. Packs designed around those claims will deliver less energy and age unpredictably because the interior cannot support the promise on the label.Comparison of an authentic cell, a counterfeit cell, and a misrepresented low-cost cell.A Gray Area: RewrappingSeparate from these two groups are rewrapped batteries. In most cases they begin as legitimate OEM cells that have been relabeled for distribution under a new brand. Many perform as expected because the core cell was designed and built by a competent manufacturer. But risk comes from uncertainty about the exact source. Rewraps can include surplus lots, cells that failed OEM QA, or units that were disassembled from larger salvaged battery packs. The new wrap hides that history, so the question becomes not whether rewraps are inherently poor, but whether any given batch matches the underlying standard. In our scans, several rewraps generally mirrored mainstream OEM geometry, though the anode overhang distributions were not as tight. One of the three rewrap brands we scanned was also markedly worse than the other two, illustrating the variability rewrapping can hide, though even the worst rewrap cells were still much higher quality than the low-cost/counterfeit cells. Population behavior separates these groups more cleanly than any single measurement. The SOOCOOL set scattered more broadly and stood well apart from genuine Samsung samples, even though some individual cells looked acceptable in isolation. The spec-inflated low-cost brands had the widest distributions, indicating exceptionally poor process controls. Rewraps generally clustered tighter, with outliers that reflected the uncertainty of source rather than a systematic departure from good practice. Distribution of median and minimum anode overhang measurements per cell.Can you trust the batteries you’re buying?Validating 18650 supply is essential because these cells are then buried into larger electronic assemblies. With numerous potentially problematic cells clustered in hard-to-access areas of devices, failures become hard to identify and address. Unfortunately current oversight of lithium-ion batteries is insufficient, focusing on hazardous material content, shipping standards, and coin-cell child safety. All are important, but battery quality is going largely untraced. The enormous size of the market makes it easy to hide gray-market activity. Questionable vendors can vanish and reappear under new listings when problems arise, as we saw firsthand.Counterfeits and dubious claims will continue to circulate as long as batteries remain ubiquitous and profitable, and they flourish in the gaps left by limited oversight. That reality makes it all the more important to recognize that every can is not created equal. When billions of cells enter the market each year, some will carry the design discipline of a reputable manufacturer and others the shortcuts of a dishonest one. Understanding the difference is not just about calling out bad actors, but about seeing how trust in the battery supply is built (or eroded) one cell at a time.

The Quality Gap

What Went Wrong Inside These Recalled Power Banks?

Lithium-ion batteries power the many electronic devices that we rely on every day, from EVs to smartphones and laptops. They’re so prevalent, that the average American owns nine lithium battery-powered devices.1 But they carry real risks when quality lapses occur. Overheating and fire hazards can cause property damage, injuries, or worse. With millions of these batteries in circulation, even a single defect can have a ripple effect of consequences for consumer safety and brand reputation. Recently, Anker recalled over one million PowerCore 10000 power banks, model A1263, produced between 2016 and 2019 and sold through 2022.2,3 Anker has provided a general warning that the lithium-ion battery can overheat, but they have yet to share the exact reason for the recall. Armed with our Neptune Industrial CT Scanner and five A1263 power banks from Lumafield team members, we set out to see if we could identify the source of this recall. Could we identify the defects with CT scanning? And could CT inspection during development or manufacturing have prevented the faulty power banks from shipping in the first place?Scanning SetupWe procured five potentially-affected power banks from various Lumafield colleagues, which we labelled PB1, PB2, PB3, PB4, and PB5. We then ran the serial numbers against Anker’s recall form, and determined that three of our power banks were impacted, while two were not.The power banks were scanned using Lumafield’s Microfocus Neptune. This configuration’s small X-ray spot size makes it the ideal tool for resolving fine details in electronics and batteries.4Use the embedded Voyager window below to explore the CT scan of the recalled power bank. Rotate and examine it from any angle.First Look: Battery CellsThe first element we compared across the power banks were the battery cells themselves. A lithium-ion battery consists of two separated electrodes. The anode, usually graphite, stores lithium ions during charging. The cathode, typically a layered metal oxide, releases and accepts lithium ions as they move through the electrolyte during charge and discharge, enabling reversible energy storage.There are a few common defects in the battery manufacturing process that can be easily spotted in a CT scan. For example, in lithium-ion batteries, it’s important to ensure that the anode has a sufficient overhang above the cathode, preventing the lithium plating that can lead to dendrite formation.5 Dendrites can subsequently result in degraded performance and short circuits, which can cause the worst-case scenarios of thermal runaway. CT scanning can also be used for Foreign Object Detection (FOD) within batteries, as particle contamination can lead to reduced performance and potentially short circuits.The A1263 power banks each contain three 18650 lithium-ion battery cells inside. It was quickly apparent that batteries from at least two different suppliers had been used within the affected power banks. The cells in PB1 (recalled), PB2 (recalled), PB4 (not recalled), and PB5 (not recalled) seemed similar, but the cells in PB3 (recalled) had a few key differences. First, the batteries in PB3 have a mandrel to help prevent core collapse, a type of deformation in lithium-ion batteries with “jelly roll” construction where the innermost layers can sag into the center.6 Mandrels can also serve as a pathway for gas escape in case of overpressurization. Some suppliers add a center tube to strengthen the core and prevent this from happening. Though none of the batteries in the five power banks we scanned seem to show core collapse, only PB3 has reinforcement material to combat this potential issue.On the left cell, from PB3, reinforcement foil appears as bright, dense material around the battery’s center. This is noticeably absent from the right cell, from PB1. The other discrepancy in the PB3 batteries is the number and style of vent openings. PB1, PB2, PB4, and PB5 have four smaller openings at the positive terminal, while the PB3 cells have three larger ones. This further suggests that the batteries in PB3 come from a different source.In the left image, we observe 3 vent openings from a cell in PB3. In the right image we see the four vent openings common across the cells in PB1, PB2, PB4, and PB5. If the recall is affecting units made with 18650 battery cells from multiple suppliers, that suggests the root cause of the recall stems from elsewhere in the power bank. We next focused on the PCB and assembly of the board with the cells.Assembly Discrepancies Looking at the assembly of the A1263 power banks, one difference between the recalled and non-recalled devices stood out immediately. All five power banks used tab bus bars to connect the positive and negative terminals of the 18650 cells. However, the non-recalled PB4 and PB5 devices used conventional insulated wires to make the positive and negative connections to the PCB, while the recalled PB1, PB2, and PB3 power banks used flat tab wire for the entirety of the connection.On the left image of PB4, thin insulated wires are clearly visible. On the right image of PB2, wide thin tabs are used for the connections instead.‍A closer look at the connections between the cells and PCB in PB4 (left) and PB2 (right).Looking more closely at the connections of PB1, PB2, and PB3, we see some process variation that could be a potential cause for concern. The shape of the negative tab differs dramatically, and in PB1 it appears slightly twisted. From left to right, the negative tab crossing above the positive tab - PB1, PB2, PB3.We can measure the distance to quantify how dramatically the gap between the positive and negative bus bars varies across the three units. In PB1, that distance is only 0.52 mm, compared to 1.12 mm in PB2 and 1.58 mm in PB3. The short distance and visible deformation in PB3 suggests the possibility of the negative bus bar shorting out against the positive bus in some scenarios.From left to right, measurements of the space between the negative and positive tabs for PB1, PB2, and PB3.Evolving Power Bank DesignIn addition to the recalled power bank, we scanned Anker’s current PowerCore 10000 model, the Anker 313. This model was first released in January 2023. The exterior of the power bank has changed significantly. At 5.87 in by 2.68 in by 0.55 in,7 compared to the A1263’s dimensions of 3.62 in by 2.36 in by 0.87 in,8 the 10K product has become longer and wider, but also noticeably thinner. Looking inside, we find this slimming has been accomplished by replacing the three 18650 cylindrical cells with a single lithium-ion pouch cell. With 90-95% packaging efficiency, pouch cells are maximally compact relative to other battery cell designs and can be customized to accommodate different industrial design requirements.9 The single-cell configuration of the Anker 313 simplifies the assembly required. We also see that significant changes have been made to the embedded electronics, as is to be expected given both the new product architecture and the general advances in PCB manufacturing since the A1263 was manufactured.CT scan of the updated Anker PowerCore 10000, showing the single lithium-ion pouch cell and a slice of its PCBA.ConclusionCT scanning the A1263 Anker PowerCore 10000 power banks has provided a small window into the supply chain complexity of these pervasive, ostensibly simple products. This SKU was manufactured over a period of 3 years and 10 months, and sold for over six and a half years. From our limited analysis of just five power banks, a small subset of the millions of devices sold, we have identified that throughout the A1263 production period at least two battery cell versions and two battery connector designs were used. A larger sample size would likely reveal further variations. Managing a high-volume battery supply chain is inherently challenging, and ensuring quality throughout each stage is essential. Only Anker can know for sure why these popular consumer devices have warranted a recall three years after they were last sold. However, though we don't know exactly what flaw triggered this massive recall, it illustrates just how costly quality issues can be. The volumes involved in these types of consumer products can be staggering, and it can be extraordinarily difficult to track quality issues all the way upstream. Since we began this exploration, Anker has issued a new recall for five additional power bank models: Anker Power Bank models A1257 and A1647, Anker MagGo Power Bank model A1652, and Anker Zolo Power Bank models A1681 and A1689.10 Unlike the A1263 Anker PowerCore 10000 power banks, these are more recent products. Anker has shared that the recall was caused by potential issues with one of their battery suppliers. Their English announcement credits the more rigorous quality processes they implemented earlier this year with catching the cause for concern,11 while announcements in China by Anker and competitor ROMOSS Technology disclosed that the cell supplier in question made an undisclosed change in the raw materials used, which could lead to insulation degradation.12 Anker has recalled 710,00 units from those models in China, and the global numbers have yet to be disclosed. Looking just at the recall of A1263 Anker PowerCore 10000 power banks sold between 2016 and 2022, about 1,158,000 units have been affected. Impacted users will receive either a replacement unit or a $30 Anker Store gift card, implying a financial exposure of over $34 million, not including other relevant recall-related costs. Beyond the immediate economic impact, battery recalls can cause permanent reputational damage that proves impossible to quantify in the long term. Anker has underscored their commitment to better quality assurance processes and signed an agreement with a new battery vendor13 as they work to regain the trust of their customers.Industrial CT inspection offers a powerful tool that can help ensure the safety of the many battery products that surround us. It can be leveraged during the design and development stages to validate designs and brought into the manufacturing ramp-up to support First Article Inspection and validate assembly processes. In production, it can non-destructively verify quality, both upstream and downstream. And after parts have shipped, CT scanning can be used to support faster failure analysis as issues arise in the field. Ultimately, ensuring the reliability of lithium-ion battery products is becoming more critical than ever, as these devices become increasingly embedded in our daily lives. As CT inspection becomes more accessible and easier to adopt, it can serve as a safeguard of both consumer safety and manufacturers’ bottom lines.

The Quality Gap

What’s Hiding Inside Haribo’s Power Bank and Headphones?

The Quality Gap

What’s Inside Your Water Filter? A CT Scan Comparison

Water filters are our silent guardians, protecting us from a whole host of invisible contaminants. But what’s happening inside them as they work tirelessly to deliver clean water? With industrial CT scanning, we can take a detailed look at the internal structure of water filters—before and after use—to uncover how they perform, age, and ultimately safeguard our health.In this deep dive, we’ll explore four types of water filters: pitcher filters, refrigerator water filters, reverse osmosis filters, and the LifeStraw. By getting to know their inner workings, we can see how each design contributes to its effectiveness and how they handle the wear and tear of daily use.Pitcher Water FiltersPitcher filters are household staples, using a blend of activated carbon and ion-exchange resin to trap impurities such as chlorine, sediment, and heavy metals like lead. When water passes through, the carbon absorbs contaminants, while the resin removes specific ions to improve taste and safety. Type image caption here (optional)A CT scan of a new pitcher filter reveals a porous, uniform core of activated carbon and resin. The material’s consistency ensures even water filtration throughout the cartridge. After use, however, the scan tells a different story. Clearly-defined flow channels are visible, suggesting that water is following the same path through the filter media each time, limiting the thoroughness of filtration. The once-pristine pores are partially blocked by accumulated sediment and impurities, and denser particles have migrated to the outer edges of the core—indicators that consistent, uniform filtration is a thing of the past for this particular filter.Refrigerator Water FiltersRefrigerator water filters deliver clean water for drinking and ice, and we barely notice them because they are directly connected to a water line. These filters rely on dense activated carbon cores enclosed within sturdy plastic shells.In a new refrigerator filter, CT highlights the robust, porous structure of the carbon core. This setup is ideal for trapping particles, chlorine, and even some volatile organic compounds. Over time, as the filter absorbs these impurities, the core grows noticeably denser as the filter absorbs contaminants day in and day out. Initially, the plastic casing was the densest element, but after months of use, the filtration media becomes markedly denser than the outer shell. Reverse Osmosis Water FiltersReverse osmosis filters take water purification to the next level, using a semi-permeable membrane composed of tightly wound layers of synthetic material. These layers create microscopic pores that allow water molecules to pass through while blocking contaminants like salts, minerals, and chemicals. The membrane is often supported by a mesh or fabric backing and enclosed in a cylindrical housing for durability and ease of installation. Reverse osmosis systems are the go-to for ultra-clean water.We worked with the GEAR Lab at MIT to compare new vs. used reverse osmosis elements. Our scan of a new reverse osmosis filter looks almost like a lithium-ion battery, with delicate but uniform layers surrounding a columnar core. Water has a pathway, impeded as it should be only by the membrane’s mesh pores. The filter worked 12 hours on, 12 hours off, for two months, then we scanned it again. Having purified a hard water supply high in mineral content, the filter now displays scars of its valiant efforts. Scaling deposits of minerals and organic matter visibly clog the layers, restricting water flow and reducing filtration efficiency.LifeStrawThe LifeStraw is a portable, personal water filter designed for outdoor adventures, travel in areas with unreliable water quality, and emergency preparedness. Unlike reverse osmosis, which relies on a semi-permeable membrane to remove dissolved solids, the LifeStraw uses hollow fiber membranes with microscopic pores to physically block contaminants like bacteria, parasites, and microplastics. This ensures clean drinking water on the go, without requiring electricity or extensive setup, making it ideal for hikers, campers, and those in disaster relief situations.A CT scan of a new LifeStraw reveals its uniform, open hollow fibers, which allow water to flow freely while trapping harmful particles along the way. Over time, and with frequent use, these fibers near the inlet begin to clog as debris accumulates, reducing both flow efficiency and the safety of the water that passes through. That makes regular cleaning a must for maintaining the performance of LifeStraw in challenging environments.Filtration for the FutureIndustrial CT offers a new level of transparency into the performance and lifespan of water filters. For consumers, it provides valuable insights into the unseen changes filters undergo, helping them make informed decisions about when to replace a filter to maintain the highest water quality. It removes the guesswork, letting us see the tangible effects of contaminants and wear over time.For manufacturers, CT scanning unlocks critical opportunities to refine designs and materials. By understanding exactly how and where blockages form, they can create filters that are not only more efficient but also longer-lasting and better suited to the diverse needs of their customers. Whether it’s tweaking carbon density or optimizing membrane layers, these improvements translate into more reliable products.Filters are more than just tools—they’re protectors of our health and safety. CT scanning goes beyond the surface, offering a glimpse into their often overlooked work and paving the way for smarter designs. With this technology, we’re not just looking at filters; we’re transforming how they serve us, ensuring better water quality today and clearing the way for tomorrow’s innovations.

Materials World

What’s Inside a Battery?

Most of us carry batteries around every day without thinking about what’s inside them. Phones, laptops, and cars all rely on their power. From the outside they seem simple; inside they’re made of carefully chosen materials that have to work together to provide the right amount of power. Battery basics The main pieces of a battery are the anode, the cathode, a separator, and an electrolyte. Cathode materials have shifted over the years. They used to be lithium cobalt oxide or lithium manganese oxide, though those are mostly phased out. Today you’ll see acronyms like LFP (lithium iron phosphate) and NMC (nickel, manganese, cobalt). Each mix has different strengths: some give higher energy density, others last longer, or are a bit more stable and safer. Anodes are usually graphite spread onto copper foil. The electrolyte is what lets lithium ions move between the anode and cathode. It is often a liquid solvent, which can be flammable; there are also versions that use a polymer instead. Those can improve safety and sometimes performance. Separators are thin polymers that keep the anode and cathode from touching. Solid-state batteries go further by using solid electrolytes, though they are still in development. Making a battery is not just stacking parts together. Powders like graphite or lithium compounds are mixed into a binder and coated onto thin foils. How evenly that coating spreads affects how it dries and how it compresses later. The tricky part is that every material behaves differently. You cannot simply swap one formulation for another and expect the process to work; each one needs its own set of parameters, which means testing, adjusting, and running trials until it works consistently. Competing priorities Every choice in battery design comes with trade-offs. Cost is always a factor; if a battery is too expensive, it will not make it to market. Safety is another non-negotiable. Failures can lead to recalls or worse. Beyond those, it depends on the application. Some batteries need the highest possible energy density, like those in electric cars. Others need long cycle life, like batteries for grid storage. Engineers weigh performance factors such as energy, lifespan, safety, and affordability against what the end product requires. Supply chain and recycling Batteries rely on critical minerals such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, and graphite; each is sourced from different parts of the world. That makes supply chains important. Tariffs, import sources, and political shifts all play a role in availability and cost. Recycling can help, and new processes are being developed, but it remains complicated. Each battery chemistry uses a different mix of metals, which makes separating them difficult. Recycling techniques depend on the physical and chemical properties of the powders and foils, so a process that works for one chemistry will not necessarily work for another. There is also the economic side. Recycling only makes sense if the materials are valuable enough to recover. Using less expensive materials can reduce dependence on scarce resources; it can also make recycling less worthwhile. Finding defects It only takes a small flaw inside a battery to cause an issue. Historically, anode overhang, where the anode extends too far past the cathode, has been a primary concern. Other defects include poor tab welds, wrinkles, or tears in electrodes. One of the main issues today is foreign particles. Tiny bits of metal can break off during welding or cutting, or fall in during assembly; those particles can trigger failures. [Embedded scan] To catch these problems, you need ways to look inside the sealed battery. CT scanning is one option, and it can detect very small particles, even down to a few microns. Ultrasound can also work, though with lower resolution. Destructive testing is another method, but it is slow and not practical for every battery that comes off the line. Balance From the outside, a battery looks simple. Inside, it is a complex mix of materials, processes, and trade-offs. Every decision, whether it is choosing LFP over NMC or tweaking how powders are coated, has ripple effects on performance, cost, safety, and recyclability. There is no perfect recipe; it is always about finding the right balance for the job at hand.

Manufacturing in 2026: Less Disruption, More Discipline

In this Article:

The slow burn of automation and AI

Reshoring isn’t here just yet

The real constraint is geopolitical and electrical

Clean data becomes imperative

AI’s next phase: augmentation instead of replacement

The discipline of real progress