Orders for machine tools increased slightly during August, but year-to-date industry sales remain sluggish at 24.7% behind 2001 levels, according to the latest figures from the American Machine Tool Distributors' Association (AMTDA, Rockville, MD) and the Association For Manufacturing Technology (AMT, McLean, VA).

US machine tool consumption hit $139.17 million in August, up 4% from July's sales but down 33.6% from sales of $209.45 million recorded in August 2001, according to the August US Machine Tool Consumption (USMTC) report. The figures, as reported by companies participating in the USMTC program, reached $1.43 billion year-to-date, down 24.7% compared to the same period in 2001.

During August, the USMTC report showed large declines in sales in each region tracked versus year-ago sales, although the August data showed some month-to-month improvements in the West (47.3%), Midwest (14.7%), and Central (9.2%) regions compared to July 2002 sales figures. Equipment sales fell in the Northeast (-37.9%) and South (-6.8%) regions versus the previous month's sales.

Professor Jiri Tlusty, 81, an SME Fellow and a founding member of the North American Manufacturing Research Institute (NAMRI) of SME, passed away in late October in Gainesville, Florida.

A native of Prague, Tlusty emigrated from the former Czechoslavia soon after the Soviet crackdown in 1968. Tlusty, who received his undergraduate and two doctoral degrees from University of Prague, is credited for much of the fundamental research leading to understanding of the dynamics of the metalcutting process including the critical relationship between dynamic stiffness and chatter, and his work led directly to the development of high-speed machining technology.

After leaving Czechoslovakia in 1969, Tlusty taught briefly at the University of Manchester as a research fellow, and later served as professor of mechanical engineering at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. In his late 60s, Tlusty started his own company, Manufacturing Laboratories Inc. (Gainesville, FL, and Las Vegas, NV), which creates and markets software and hardware to support high-speed machining, and also designs and builds custom, high-performance, high-accuracy machine tools for large manufacturers.

The recipient of numerous machine tool industry awards, Tlusty wrote many technical articles and authored two textbooks, Structure of Machine Tools and Manufacturing Processes and Equipment. Tlusty was a member of SME, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and CIRP, the International Institute for Production Research, which he served as president in 1968. Tlusty also was an ASME Fellow.

Since 1984, Tlusty served as a Graduate Research Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department of the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he established and directed the University of Florida's Machine Tool Research Center prior to his retirement in May 2000. A memorial service for Professor Tlusty was held in November at the Baughman Center on the University of Florida campus.

Software

Philippe Charles is CEO of Delmia Corp. (Troy, MI), a supplier of digital manufacturing and 3-D simulation software tools.

Manufacturing Engineering: What is digital manufacturing?

Charles: It's as a key technology to do manufacturing differently, in the sense of using new tools and our customers finding new ways of defining the manufacturing processes. It's done mainly through digital mockup. Digital manufacturing is an enabler or contributor for the competitiveness of key manufacturing industries, particularly automotive and aerospace. Digital manufacturing is to the factory and its manufacturing processes what the CAD system is to the product. While the CAD system is really about defining what to build in the manufacturing industry, whether it's a car or another product, digital manufacturing answers the question of how to build, and with what to build, through this digital mockup of factory layout or an assembly line, which allows you to get the best efficiency and the most optimized solution.

ME: What can the digital factory and simulation tools do for manufacturers?

Charles: Digital manufacturing and these technologies really are about driving innovation, developing and bringing to market innovative new products faster. It really contributes to reducing and compressing time-to-market. Last but not least, digital manufacturing is about cost efficiency, quality, and productivity. One of the big drivers is linking the product design with the process-engendering phases. It's a product-process approach--with the product being the car, aircraft, or whatever it is--and the software all the manufacturing processes related to that.

With a new car program you have to deal with a new body shop, a new powertrain for engine and transmission, and final assembly. These solutions give you the ability to design the body of the car together with the body shop process, where there are a lot of manufacturing processes involved, like welding activities, and a lot of different equipment, including lines of robots, that are related to the body process. It allows you to have the tools and solutions to produce all the manufacturing processes of the body shop in a very collaborative environment with solutions tied to the process design side.

ME: This means manufacturers can tie their product processes with actual simulations of the process?

Charles: Absolutely. This is about linking the product design together with the manufacturing process design, and it really involves the ability to start the engendering of the manufacturing engineering processes very early in the product development cycle. This directly contributes to reducing the time needed to develop a new product. The other piece is really about accelerating the process design, and reducing the time you need before you have what's called a style freeze. In the auto industry, there is the time between the style freeze and the start of production. Looking at the time before that and the start of production in the real factory, our solution enables compressing this time by giving this capability to the planners, describing the manufacturing process itself, and to the tooling designers, while they're designing the tooling, and to the simulation engineers, using a different set of tools in a collaborative way to come up with the finalized and optimized manufacturing process through the digital mockup. With these tools, manufacturers can prove out each process before implementing it at the factory level through the power of digital mockup. It's an efficient way to go faster, to cut metal, and to invest in tooling.

ME: What are some of the successful implementations of digital manufacturing?

Charles: Toyota Motor Corp. is using it to completely change the way they are engineering their products, moving from hardware prototypes to virtual assembly review. Toyota is using this technology and our tools in all of the nine divisions of Toyota worldwide. DaimlerChrysler also has a key digital factory initiative, and by 2005, DaimlerChrysler intends to have a full implementation of our solution in all areas, meaning body, powertrain, and final assembly, as an enterprise solution together with their key suppliers. This will enable them to create the manufacturing processes of their new factories and plants with our tools through digital mockup.

ME: How do Delmia's simulation tools work with Dassault Systemes' CATIA CAD/CAM software under the CATIA Product, Process, Resource (PPR) model?

Charles: It supports the idea of the product model down to the manufacturing, production, and the lifecycle. We are doing that through some key elements or key events. Delmia, CATIA, and Enovia, which supports collaborative tools, all support our product lifecycle management (PLM) through a common infrastructure in the PPR, using the same digital model, whether it's about product, process, or resources. The functional database and the repository of the models for product, processes, and resources are all linked in the common infrastructure.

ME: What will the recently released Delmia Version 5 Release 10 (V5R10) software offer to customers looking for digital manufacturing and simulation solutions?

Charles: Our approach is to give customers solutions to cover end-to-end, vertical manufacturing processes--body, powertrain, and final assembly in automotive, and airframe assembly or machining in aerospace. With R10, we are adding a complete end-to-end solution for the Body-in-White process in the automotive industry, and also for aerospace assembly. With this solution, you can leverage everything that has been done upstream, and through digital mockup and access to the 3-D visualization of process, you see capabilities on the shop floor on the execution side. So this is really about making 3-D available on the shop floor, both for Body-in-White in automotive and the assembly domain in aerospace.

The Department of Energy's (DOE) Sandia National Laboratories (Albuquerque, NM) and Cray Inc. (Seattle) have finalized a contract worth approximately $90 million under which Cray will collaborate with Sandia in developing a new massively parallel-processing (MPP) supercomputer, called Red Storm, that will be used in modeling and simulation of advanced weapons systems.

Under the DOE's Advanced Simulation and Computing Program (ASCI) contract awarded in June, Cray will deliver a system with theoretical peak performance of 40 trillion calculations per second (teraOPS) using two calculations per clock cycle, or 20 teraOPS using one calculation per clock cycle. The Red Storm supercomputer, which is expected to become operational in fiscal year 2004, will use the upcoming Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s (Sunnyvale, CA) Opteron processors connected via a low-latency, high-bandwidth, 3-D mesh interconnect network based on HyperTransport technology. This system is expected to be at least seven times more powerful than Sandia's current ASCI Red supercomputer on actual weapons problems. ASCI Red was the first supercomputer delivered under the ASCI program.

The Red Storm initiative is considered a crucial step in developing and deploying scalable, cost-effective supercomputers to meet the demanding simulation needs of nuclear weapons stockpile stewardship. "This computer will allow modeling and simulation of complex problems that were only recently thought impractical, if not impossible," notes Sandia Senior Vice President for Nuclear Weapons Programs Tom Hunter. "Calculations that would have taken months only a dozen years ago will now be done in a matter of minutes. This investment by Sandia and the NNSA represents a clear commitment to provide the essential capabilities to support the nation's nuclear weapons program."

IBM Corp. (White Plains, NY) has signed an agreement to purchase product lifecycle management (PLM) supplier EADS Matra Datavision (Paris), a wholly owned subsidiary of EADS Group. The transaction, subject to regulatory approvals, will add EADS Matra Datavision's PLM offerings into IBM's PLM unit, and the deal is expected to be completed by January 1.

GE Fanuc Automation North America (Charlottesville, VA) signed a definitive agreement to acquire automation software supplier Intellution Inc. (Foxborough, MA) from Emerson Process Management, a unit of Emerson (St. Louis), for an undisclosed amount. Intellution is a supplier of an HMI/SCADA software platform for collection and distribution of plant-floor data.

Mori Seiki (Irving, TX) has released its CAPS-VEGA software designed to enhance productivity of its machining centers. By expanding the capabilities of conversational software for machining centers, CAPS-VEGA significantly reduces programming time and data entry errors by importing Parasolid CAD models created by in-house designers or customers.

The software, developed at Mori Seiki's Digital Technology Laboratory (Sacramento, CA), automatically extracts all machineable features data with auto feature recognition. Once data has been imported, the software analyzes it to determine cutting planes and the best way to machine the part features, such as choosing between drilling and pocketing, giving machinists a fully populated feature tree representing all the operations needed to create the part.