For global automakers, removing weight from their vehicles remains the top priority as they seek ways to meet a stringent federal fuel economy mandate by 2025 and other new pollution-control regulations.
Altair and the Center for Automotive Research (CAR) have announced the winners of the 5th annual Altair Enlighten Award, which strives to promote and celebrate innovation in automotive lightweighting.
Nanodiamond material specialist Carbodeon of Finland has worked with metal finishing specialist CCT Plating of Germany, to develop a new electroless nickel, PTFE and nanodiamond composite coating.
A team of researchers from UC Berkeley, led by Pieter Abbeel, is working on the creation of smart robots that are teachable and can learn new skills without pre-programming. Abbeel and his team also formed a startup called Embodied Intelligence with the aim of developing artificial intelligence (AI) software to enable robots to learn from humans to perform complex tasks.
Thermoplastic composites are gaining traction in manufacturing applications, offering benefits like lighter weight, faster production times, longer shelf life and easier shipping compared with metals or other composites.
As manufacturing becomes ever more complex, tools that assist workers with difficult or unfamiliar tasks are becoming critical to process efficiency and product quality. An explosion in the development of mobile, wearable, and augmented reality (AR) computing technologies has thus created a new world of possibilities for the manufacturing industry.
Manufacturers are accelerating use of Internet of Things (IoT) technology, according to a survey of 66 companies.
Most manufacturers have relied on third-party vendors to make parts that are then incorporated into the final product. From automakers sourcing stereos and aircraft makers contracting for jet engines to a small bakery ordering plastic bags or a woodshop buying nails, producers of all types have supplemented their internal capabilities through a painstakingly developed supply chain of external vendors.
The combination of metrology hardware, adaptive CAM software and connectivity to plant-wide systems is making additive hybrid machine tool applications ever more practical on the shop floor.
Some things are a given today. One is computing is cheap and powerful, and it is getting cheaper and more powerful. Another is the dropping price of industrial sensors. Combine this with easier ways of moving around data from those sensors and you get lots of data: Terabytes of data.
