This year, domestic technology continued to break through.
Take stock of the core technologies of this year: 22 nm mask aligner, 450 kg artificial sapphire, 0.12 mm glass, large spacecraft recycling, shield machine "abandoning shell and returning", long-distance iris recognition … … Which one is not eye-catching!
In 2018, high-tech achievements blossomed in all walks of life, which not only improved industrial efficiency, but also created more convenience for people’s lives. The main body of scientific and technological innovation is moving towards the goal of "mastering the core technology independently and breaking the foreign monopoly".
1 intelligent water knife to cut iron and break gold
At the 4th integration of defense and civilian technologies High-tech Equipment Exhibition in October, a magical water knife attracted the audience to stop. It uses water as the blade to cut all kinds of materials, separate sponges, cut through rocks and cut off steel, which is better than laser cutting. Its full name is five-axis and five-linkage intelligent water knife, which is developed and produced by Shanghai Shimai Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Shimai Technology) and has independent intellectual property rights.
The principle of water knife is very similar to the water gun that children play with. Pressurize ordinary tap water to more than 4000 atmospheres, forcing the pressurized water to be ejected from a small nozzle to form a high-speed jet, and adding sharp and broken small particles into this high-speed jet to form a high-speed abrasive jet.
The energy of water jet is huge, and the high-pressure water jet hits the cutting object at three times the speed of sound to realize cutting. Compared with the "predecessor" laser cutting, the water jet cutting process is a process of high-speed grinding and rapid cooling, with no thermal damage and deformation, no smoke and dust, and it is green and environmentally friendly. Simply put, the laser can cut or not, and the water jet can cut. Both Boeing and Airbus use a lot of intelligent water knives for machining.
It is difficult to achieve precision cutting by water knife, laser and plasma cutting. Shimai Technology has developed a unique high-quality control system after 3 years. By using mathematical model to accurately predict the error of each point on the jet path, the speed, acceleration, deflection angle of the cutting head and the characteristic parameters of the jet are accurately controlled, and the high-precision goal of automatically eliminating the error is achieved under the condition of maximizing the cutting efficiency.
2 iris recognition is 1.2 meters away, and it is done in two seconds.
Iris recognition is the most reliable biometric technology except DNA, which is unique and anti-counterfeiting. At first, iris recognition should stick the eyes to the equipment like a telescope, and then it was expanded to recognize within half a meter of the equipment. In November, Hongxing Technology officially put into production the "Driver Biometric Identification Integrated Machine", which expanded the iris recognition distance to 1.2 meters, and it was only a glance without too much cooperation.
Everyone’s iris is unique. Under the condition of infrared light, it can present rich texture characteristics and stabilize more than 200 feature points. After eye brushing, the instrument extracts the feature code with high discrimination and compares it with the database. This process is called iris recognition. The advantage of iris recognition mainly lies in finding people accurately in a huge database. Accurately find a person in the surveillance video, the crowd base of 10,000 people should be identified by face, the people below 100,000 people should be identified by fingerprint, and 1 million people should be identified by iris.
The iris is only about 1 square centimeter, the face is 300 square centimeters, and the recognition difficulty is 300 times different. The distance is a little far, so it is difficult to collect clear iris texture; Moreover, people’s own shaking and blinking will cause a series of problems such as motion blur and eyelid occlusion.
In the imaging stage of Hongxing Technology, an image sensor with more than 10 million pixels is used to ensure sufficient iris resolution. Carefully calculate the angle and intensity of near-infrared light source to illuminate iris texture without hurting human eyes; Move the intelligent algorithm into the imaging equipment to make imaging and calculation work together; Fast image quality judgment algorithm, discarding low-quality images and focusing on identifying high-quality iris images; Optimize the algorithm to process hundreds of iris images with tens of millions of pixels in one second. Finally, 2 seconds iris recognition within 1.2 meters distance was achieved.
3 subsea shield machine realizes "retire after success"
Shield machines that tunnel under the sea can only dig and cannot retreat, and equipment worth tens of millions of yuan is often "gone forever". On August 20th, with the last cutterhead removed from the subsea tunnel of Xiamen Metro Line 3, the subsea shield machine successfully returned backwards for the first time in the world.
The shield machine is an expert at digging holes. Its head is a disk full of "teeth", which keeps rotating and gnaws away dirt and stones. There are motors and mud circulation pipes in the long barrel body with a length of more than 100 meters and a weight of about 800 tons. The new space behind it is spliced with arc-shaped cement segments, and the tunnel is formed. However, the shield construction makes the diameter of the tunnel behind it smaller, so the shield machine can’t retreat, and it is usually permanently sealed in a dead end next to the tunnel.
However, the construction party of Xiamen Metro Line 3 subsea tunnel, China Railway No.1 Urban Rail Company, came up with a way to remove the shield machine and transport it out. They asked experts to work out the tilting method of adjusting the cutting angle without rotating the cutter head, which solved the problem of removing the cutter head.
The submarine tunnel is at a high temperature of 40℃, and the demolition machine is cut by flame, which is quite dangerous. To this end, the machine was dismantled in three shifts, and a high-power electric fan was added every 100 meters in the tunnel for ventilation. Detailed disclosure before disassembly, preparation of fire control facilities before hot work, and real-time detection of gas in the hole during hot work. And customized special heavy-duty wagons, which solved the problem of transporting 65 tons of parts at a time.
In the end, the dismantling period was less than one month, and more than 14,000 parts of the shield machine were safely dismantled, boxed and transported back to the warehouse. The shell of the shield machine is left in the tunnel as the inner wall. This has created another project in China.
4 artificial sapphire 450 kg broke the record.
At the beginning of 2018, 450 kg artificial sapphire was born in China. Won the "laurel" of artificial sapphire crystal with the highest weight and the largest monomer in the world. It increased the world record of 350kg held by Russia in 2017 by 100kg.
Artificial sapphire is an important raw material in high-tech production field. From smart phone cameras, touch screens, LED lights, to national heavyweights, high-intensity lasers, and optical components of astronomical observation systems, they are increasingly widely used.
Since the new century, China’s sapphire production equipment and technology are still largely dependent on imports, especially China’s production capacity and product size can not meet the comprehensive needs of national defense technology and national heavyweight.
This artificial sapphire is based on the mainstream kyropoulos method production technology in the world. The principle is as follows: firstly, the alumina raw material is heated to the melting point to form a molten soup; then, a seed crystal rod contacts the surface of the molten soup, and a single crystal with the same crystal structure as the seed crystal begins to grow on the solid-liquid interface between the seed crystal rod and the molten soup; the seed crystal is pulled up at a very slow speed, and finally solidified into a whole single crystal.
This process is long, which has very strict requirements for furnace temperature control and coordinated application of production system. The production of 450 kg products is qualitatively different from the production of 200 kg and 350 kg products in terms of technical requirements. Zhang Jun, the general manager of the company, said: "Our core technologies are self-developed automatic production equipment, hot production design theory and micro-process application. The selection, processing and production of raw materials are all made in China."
The thinnest glass is only 0.12mm thick.
After 0.15mm, China technicians pursued the ultimate, and pulled out 0.12mm ultra-thin electronic touch glass, which set a world record for the industrial production of the thinnest glass by float technology. In May, the latest batch of ultra-thin glass of Bengbu China Building Materials Information Display Materials Co., Ltd. rolled off the assembly line.
The thickness of ultra-thin glass is 0.1— Between 1.1 mm, it can be used as the basic material for mobile phones, computers and TV display screens. The thinner the glass, the better its light transmittance and flexibility, and the easier it is to break. However, the newly developed 0.12mm ultra-thin glass will not break if it is bent into a ring.
For every 0.1 mm drop in glass thickness, the manufacturing difficulty increases beyond imagination. From 0.3 mm in 2013 to 0.12 mm as thin as paper, the enterprise has solved four major problems of glass thinning, micro-defects, design and manufacture of three major thermal equipment and glass formula, and developed a series of technical means such as cutting, conveying and on-line defect detection of glass cold end.
From 0.15 mm to 0.12 mm, which is almost indistinguishable from the naked eye, the team tackled the problem for 2 years. After breaking through more than 1000 technical bottlenecks in melting process, molding process, cutting process, inspection and packaging and equipment technology, the world’s thinnest 0.12mm float glass was finally born. A few years ago, the glass and equipment of hundreds of display panel production lines in China were completely imported. Now, the domestic ultra-thin glass technology is internationally leading and highly competitive. The price of display screen has dropped, and electronic products are relatively more affordable. At present, the company has begun to develop 0.1 mm ultra-thin glass.
6 spacecraft recovery weight is pushed to more than 7 tons.
Rocket recycling and reuse is an important label of Musk SpaceX. In fact, China has also recovered 3.5 tons of shenzhou spaceship manned cabin. In November, 508 Institute of the Fifth Academy of Aerospace verified the key technology, which can push the weight of China’s spacecraft recovery to more than 7 tons. This is closely related to the successful development of large group parachute system and heavy load landing buffer system by 508 Institute. The institute successfully carried out the first airdrop test of large-scale group parachute system and heavy-load landing buffer system in China by putting a 7-ton model on the helicopter plug-in, and the main technical indicators in the field of large-scale spacecraft recovery reached the international advanced level.
The primary deceleration of the recovered spacecraft during reentry and return mainly depends on the deceleration parachute. Different from the single parachute system in shenzhou spaceship, the newly developed deceleration parachute is a group parachute system, which consists of two deceleration umbrellas and three main umbrellas. The bearing capacity and umbrella type design of deceleration parachute are greatly optimized; The main umbrella ensures the consistent synchronization of inflation among the umbrellas. The multi-stage folding and unfolding of the group parachute system effectively reduces the parachute opening load.
In the landing recovery stage, the lossless landing recovery of heavy-duty spacecraft requires high landing buffer system. To this end, 508 scientific research teams have overcome many key technologies such as dynamic modeling and simulation of multi-airbag combined cushioning; The time of landing buffer process is very short, and a high-sensitivity landing sensor is developed to solve the problem of fast response landing buffer control. Finally, the system can work reliably and the return cabin can land stably.
7 22 nm mask aligner "carved" fine lines
On November 29th, the "super-resolution lithography equipment" developed by Chinese Academy of Sciences passed the acceptance test. The world’s first mask aligner with a resolution of 22 nm using an ultraviolet light source is significant in achieving a higher resolution with a cheap light source, which is used in some special manufacturing scenes. Mask aligner is not only used for making chips, but also for engraving complicated patterns on a flat material. Mask aligner is equivalent to a projector, and light is a carving knife, which "carves" fine line patterns on the photosensitive plate.
Mask aligner using deep ultraviolet light source is the mainstream, but its disadvantage is that it is too expensive; Mask aligner, an extreme ultraviolet light source monopolized by ASML in the Netherlands, is even more expensive. One set costs 30 million yuan, and it will be used under vacuum. The 22nm mask aligner developed by Chinese Academy of Sciences uses ultraviolet mercury lamp. The price of the whole machine is from one million yuan to ten million yuan, and the processing capacity is between deep ultraviolet and extreme ultraviolet, which is exciting.
Mask aligner, developed by Chinese Academy of Sciences, is good at processing a series of nano-functional devices including large-aperture thin-film mirrors, which is of great significance to China’s remote sensing imaging, biochemical trace measurement, special surface materials and other fields.
Yong Yang, a scientist at the Institute of Optoelectronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, explained the principle in this way. He took a piece of metal and a nonmetal piece in close contact, and there were some jumping electrons on the interface. When light is projected on the metal, these electrons oscillate in an orderly manner, generating electromagnetic waves with a wavelength of tens of nanometers, which can be used for lithography.
8 Fine-grained image recognition "check out at a glance"
In the research of traditional computer vision, the target objects of image recognition are usually classified in the traditional sense, such as "dog", "car" and "bird". But everyone should have this experience: when shopping, I saw the cute dog of passers-by, but I only knew it was a "dog" but I didn’t know its specific breed. However, fine-grained image recognition technology can accurately distinguish even subtle differences of target objects and solve such problems.
The fine-grained image recognition intelligent cashier system, which is now installed in Nanjing fast food restaurant, can accurately identify dozens of dishes with nearly 100% recognition rate. When the system is in operation, diners only need to put the selected dishes in the recognition area, and the system will immediately display the list of dishes and the price, so that they can settle accounts.
Dr. Wei Xiushen, head of Face++ Nanjing Research Institute of Defiance Technology, said: "First, we collected nearly 1,000 images of dishes to be recognized through data collection, and then designed a fine-grained image recognition algorithm based on deep learning for subtle differences among many dishes. In addition to the conventional convolutional neural network module, the algorithm obtains the global discriminant information of the whole dish, and also includes a ‘ Attention ’ Module, which can automatically ‘ Focus ’ To the local image area of slightly different dishes. These local areas can effectively assist the algorithm to identify fine-grained dishes. " In this way, the recognition features of the whole fine-grained image not only contain the characteristics of the food level, but also contain more discriminating local features, making the classification accurate. Compared with the traditional way of label settlement, fine-grained image recognition technology greatly reduces the system and labor costs, and at the same time greatly improves the efficiency of customer ordering and checkout.
9 "Porcelain Live" Made of Inferior Clay of UHV Insulator
In the infrastructure of substations and high-voltage transmission lines, there is a kind of porcelain insulator, which weighs more than ten kilograms to dozens of kilograms. It is extremely important but often overlooked. According to the requirements of China’s UHV power grid, it is the core performance of insulator products to withstand millions of volts and tens of tons of tension. In December, the world’s first automatic production line of porcelain insulators was officially commissioned in the factory area of Inner Mongolia Jingcheng Insulator Co., Ltd.
The company uses inferior clay to make products with higher density than high-quality clay, which can withstand millions of volts, which is a technological revolution in the industry.
To this end, the company team has carried out hundreds of particle composition analysis and formula experiments on associated clay for many years, and determined that the proportion of associated non-high-quality clay in the raw materials of products is 60%, and finally obtained the "top secret formula" with independent intellectual property rights, realizing the goal that each UHV insulator can serve for 50 years.
Moreover, through more than 20 technical integration innovations in the past decade, the automatic production that the world porcelain insulator industry has dreamed of has also been realized. The world’s first automated production line was born in Jingcheng insulator workshop. The roller kiln on the production line is like a conveyor belt. When the roller rotates, the ceramics are transported from the kiln head to the kiln tail, and the fully automatic production from batching, manufacturing, glazing, baking, testing and finally packaging is completed.
10 trace the source of water lines and find out the sewage enterprises
This year, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment conducted on-site supervision on the remediation of black and odorous water bodies in 70 cities in 30 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities. If it rains during the inspection, black and odorous water will emerge. If it doesn’t rain, the black and odorous water will be well hidden, and the problem of illegal sewage discharge will be covered up.
This water quality "fingerprint" recognizer independently developed by Wu Jing’s research group of Tsinghua University Institute of Environment acts as Sherlock Holmes in China’s pollution control field, and can find out the pollution "suspect" by relying on water lines.
Every enterprise’s wastewater contains its own unique information, mainly residual pollutants, which is the water mark of wastewater. The fluorescence emitted by each substance is different. The higher the concentration of the substance, the more prominent it is in the spectrum. Collecting water quality "fingerprint" is to collect the fluorescence spectrum of wastewater. The wastewater watermark database is similar to the suspect fingerprint database of the police. By comparing the water fingerprint to be detected with the watermark database, the "suspect" can be found.
Once the water pattern exceeds the warning limit, the 24-hour monitoring instrument will automatically warn.
In addition, the instrument will automatically save water quality fingerprints for more than 10 years, and automatically take abnormal water marks as tracing evidence when problems are found. It can also complement other types of pollution traceability technologies to form a combination boxing, shortening the investigation time from the original weeks to about half an hour, with conclusive evidence and clear supervision direction.