America Makes, the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute, proudly announces a new, seven year Cooperative Agreement (CA) with the Department of Air Force, Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL).
Our mission to revolution manufacturing supply chains. As we all know, industrial supply chains today are quite linear, so they are not easily adaptable—and they will need to go through a transformation.
In manufacturing, the most efficient process is destined to come out on top. Efficiency is the highest priority. Toyota revolutionized the standards of efficient manufacturing by applying the principles of what is now known as lean thinking, a term coined by Daniel T. Jones and James P. Womack who have studied Toyota’s rise in-depth.
There is a lot of promise in the coming adoption of Model-Based Definition (MBD) in industry. MBD is the practice of attaching useful information to a 3D CAD model, such as tolerances or material properties. This should be especially good news for manufacturing engineers.
3DMEDNET, publisher of the journal 3D Printing in Medicine, produced a webinar with useful information for anyone in the throes of setting up and running an in-hospital 3D printing service.
LEO Lane, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based software company, is positioning itself as a resource for manufacturers to get more consistent results from 3D printing.
Simulation in manufacturing is becoming much more pervasive. Advanced visualizations are used everywhere, from machining on shop-floor CNCs to offline CAD/CAM programming of NC equipment.
My first experience with additive manufacturing was 10 years ago when I managed a project to develop a 3D-printed, remotely piloted aircraft. Within this program, a 3D-printed parts producer, that mainly printed prototypes at the time, collaborated with a university and an aerospace systems manufacturer.
Aerospace is an incredibly exacting industry. Everything from design to manufacturing to maintenance must go exactly as planned to keep planes flying safely, and even when they do, mistakes can happen, leading to tragedy.
Metalworking machines are fast, powerful, and accurate, but they weren’t always as capable as they are today. Modern equipment is more nimble, flexible and adaptable. The machines collectively exceed the sum of their parts.