Empowering Tidal, Mass Production and Delivery of 3000-Hour Salt Spray Resistant Enclosures

Today, the production workshop of Runpeng Precision Hardware is exceptionally bustling – the new-generation marine equipment enclosures customized for Tidal, a U.S.-based company, have finally completed mass production after months of intensive efforts, and the first batch of products is being packed and ready for shipment one after another. Looking at the neatly arranged enclosures printed with the "Tidal" logo, all colleagues involved in the project can hardly contain their excitement. This is not only the delivery of an order, but also another major breakthrough for us in the field of marine-grade precision structural components.

Many people may not be familiar with Tidal yet. This company, often referred to as "Tidal" for short, emerged from the "Moonshot Factory" X Lab under Alphabet, the parent company of Google, and is a pioneering AI technology enterprise focusing on intelligent aquaculture. It deeply integrates underwater vision technology with artificial intelligence to provide efficient and sustainable solutions for the aquaculture industry. Its innovative technology also made it to the list of the Best Sustainable Inventions of 2023 by Time Magazine. Being able to become a partner of such a top-tier enterprise is both recognition and a great responsibility for Runpeng.

Demand as the Guide, Technology as the Breakthrough——

The cooperation originated from Tidal's urgent need for marine equipment protection. The marine environment with high salt spray and strong corrosion has always been a "natural enemy" of underwater equipment enclosures. When Tidal approached us – a company with 15 years of experience in precision structural component manufacturing – through industry channels, it clearly put forward the requirement of "breaking through the traditional protection limit". To this end, we set up a special technical team and invested in R&D immediately. The core base material is 6061 aluminum alloy with excellent stability, which is precision-machined and formed through thousands of processes by the company's five-axis CNC machining center, and then reinforced with a double-layer protection process of "50μm hard anodizing + marine-grade powder coating". Each process has undergone repeated adjustments; the powder coating formula alone was optimized 6 times. Finally, the product passed the authoritative third-party testing, achieving no rust and no delamination in a salt spray environment for 3000 hours, and its protection performance is nearly 3 times higher than that of conventional products in the industry.

"Accurately meeting customer needs is never just empty talk," the production director mentioned at today's delivery ceremony. To understand the real pain points in the use of equipment enclosures, our engineers made a special trip to board the fishing boats operating in the Atlantic Ocean together with Tidal's technical team. On the bumpy deck, they recorded the stress points and corrosion-prone areas of the enclosures, and these on-site data became the key basis for technical optimization. In response to Tidal's dual requirements of "high-precision installation + strong environmental adaptability", we strictly controlled the machining accuracy to a strict standard of ±0.01mm.

The multi-specification interfaces reserved on the surface of the enclosure can flexibly adapt to the full range of marine electronic equipment under Tidal, such as navigators and sensors; even the exclusive "Tidal" logo on the top of the enclosure adopts the company's patented high-adhesion ink process for coloring, which remains clear and intact after 100 simulated seawater scouring tests. In addition, the lightweight advantage of 6061 aluminum alloy (with a density of only 2.73g/cm³) combined with the super high tensile strength (exceeding 310MPa) after T6 heat treatment enables this enclosure to be suitable for both small monitoring equipment and heavy-duty protection needs of offshore energy platforms, fully covering Tidal's business scenarios.

At this moment, the first batch of customized enclosures has completed vacuum packaging and is about to be shipped to Tidal's warehouse center on the U.S. East Coast through an exclusive cold-chain logistics channel. More pleasingly, based on the solid foundation of this cooperation, the two parties have reached a long-term strategic cooperation intention. In the future, Runpeng will provide Tidal with synchronized structural design and production support for its new product R&D, and open a green channel for customized production, stably controlling the cycle from design to delivery within 15 working days.

From repeated tests in the laboratory to the pursuit of excellence on the production line, from the fishing boat decks in the Atlantic Ocean to today's mass delivery, this cooperation experience has strengthened our belief even more: only by focusing on customer needs and breaking through bottlenecks with technological innovation can we go further on the road of precision manufacturing. In the future, Runpeng Precision Hardware will continue to deepen its presence in the field of marine-grade structural components and empower the global development of marine technology with more high-quality products.