inbound

Can you lick this?

If you like to buy postage stamps that reflect your personal and professional interests, you might want to hurry to the nearest post office to pick up a set of the new stamps featuring cargo ships in honor of the U.S. Merchant Marine.

The U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, N. Y., was a fitting setting for the late-July release of the four-stamp pane. The illustrations on the stamps include an 1850s clipper ship, an 1850s auxiliary merchant steamship, a World War II-era Liberty ship, and—to our delight—a modern-day container ship. According to the USPS, the painting on that stamp is based on a photograph of the R.J. Pfeiffer, launched in 1992 and operated by Matson Navigation Co.

The stamps are “Forever” stamps, which means they are usable indefinitely, regardless of future changes in postage rates. ;

Tie me to the moon …
Heavy lifting with RFID

Consumer goods have dominated the radio-frequency identification (RFID) discussion for so long that most of us tend to think small when we talk about tracking products with RFID tags.

But that’s not the case at POSCO. The South Korean manufacturing, power, and services conglomerate is thinking big—very big— when it comes to RFID. The company has implemented a proprietary RFID-based logistics system to track and trace huge steel coils at two of its manufacturing plants.

The RFID system includes DogBone paper-based UHF tags from the Finnish technology company UPM, hand-held industrial PDAs, RFID readers attached to cranes and placed at factory gates, enterprise resource planning and manufacturing execution systems, and a server. POSCO tags the metal coils during packaging, and the tags are read when the coils are moved by cranes to the warehouse, during storage, and again when they’re prepped for shipment.

Implementing RFID in steel mills is challenging because metal interferes with RF signals’ readability. To address that problem, POSCO is using modified UHF tags that have two antennas and are applied upright inside the metal coils, perpendicular to the items’ curved surfaces.

In addition to enabling product traceability, the RFID system has helped POSCO reduce packaging and shipping errors, allowed customers to use a Web-based interface to electronically track their orders, and cut costs by $1.4 million per month, according to a press release issued by the company and UPM. More savings are on the way: Starting in October, POSCO will extend the system to all of its steel products, tagging some 2 million items annually. ;

If you can recall tying a toy to a string and hoisting it up to a playmate stationed in a treehouse above you, this will sound familiar.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is testing a cargo system that would do much the same thing. Known as a “space elevator,” the concept involves shipping a loaded container into space by ferrying it along a cable thousands of miles long.

The plan calls for a ribbon of superstrong material to be tethered at one end to a base station on Earth and at the other end, to a counterweight in space to keep the tether taut. Photovoltaic cells on the tether would absorb laser light beamed from the base station; the laser’s energy would then be converted to electricity to propel the cargo container.

Pure science fiction? Maybe not. According to an article in the July 2011 issue of National Geographic, a demonstration back in 2009 succeeded in sending a laser-powered robotic device up a cable that stretched more than a half mile above California’s Mojave Desert. Carbon nanotubes, molecular strands of carbon that are the strongest known material today, may be light and strong enough to form a tether that could extend tens of thousands of miles.

NASA is so anxious to build a viable cargo carrying system that it sponsors an annual Space Elevator Conference, where engineers discuss potential designs. Earthbound logisticians can relate to NASA’s main reason for sponsoring space elevator research: After the initial expense of construction is recouped, it would enable high-volume shipping at a much lower cost.