Demand for machining titanium for aerospace applications won’t abate any time soon. It is driving OEMs and the supply chain in the commercial airplane market to find ways to dramatically increase machining output. Whatever date you pick from now until 2030, there’s a sufficient backlog of commercial airliners for both structural and jet engine applications to keep spindles humming around the clock cutting titanium.
When you walk into the Redeye On Demand facility in Eden Prairie, MN, you enter into one version of the factory of the future. There you will see a bank of 100 high-end Fortus fused-deposition modeling (FDM) machines from Stratasys that provide the capacity to build real, functional parts with production-grade thermoplastics directly from CAD data.
Micro components continue to shrink in size, demanding ever-greater precision and improved handling of parts with sub-micron-sized features. New approaches in micro machining technology include higher-precision systems from traditional micro machining developers, as well as techniques using additive manufacturing processes and semiconductor wafer-scale technology on the smallest of micro parts.
Burrs, sharp edges, and rough surfaces plague even the most precise metal-cutting or forming process. Deburring and finishing can often be treated as the step-child of a manufacturing process, but its importance is growing as tolerances get tighter and precision devices become the norm.
New ISO safety specification helps automation developers design safer robots for close encounters on the factory floor
Until the middle of 2010, first-tier subcontract machinist, JJ Churchill, could produce turbine blades only if they had their fir-tree root-forms preground elsewhere, or if they were subsequently added by another subcontractor. No longer is this the case.
A dynamic safety concept has been implemented in the Industrie 4.0 demo production plant of the SmartFactoryKL consortium on the basis of an industrial, Ethernet-based communications protocol.
Data management and the maintenance of clean, usable data for asset performance metrics pose great challenges for manufacturers today.
Comau, Microsoft and ICONICS are debuting here at Hannover Messe the results of their work together to improve manufacturing production around the world, in terms of efficiency and total cost of ownership.
Kennametal Inc. (Pittsburgh) announced June 29 that its board of directors has appointed Christopher (Chris) Rossi as president and CEO and has named him a director. Rossi succeeds Ron De Feo, whom the board has appointed executive chairman. Both appointments are effective August 1.
