Like just about every other manufacturing operation, welding has made the leap into the 21st century with automation, agile manufacturing processes, and offline programming.
Before the coronavirus pandemic upended normal life and essentially shut down commercial airliners, the aviation industry had a projected need for 40,000 new aircraft—planes, helicopters, air taxis, and unmanned aerial vehicles—in the next 20 years.
A burr could become a danger point in the turbine engine. Classical manufacturing processes like turning, milling and grinding can lead to burr formation and unwanted sharp edges.
Honeywell Aerospace, part of global commercial and consumer engineering conglomerate Honeywell, produces a large number of the impellers and blisks used in commercial aeroplanes.
Since 1996, the Plant 15 machining operations at Mercury Marine have included a reliance on automated machining cells. Over the years, the Fond du Lac, Wis.-based manufacturer and distributor of marine engines, parts, accessories and integrated systems has phased out some traditional manufacturing methods in favor of modern cells.
The concept of the digital twin in A&D was born in the 1970s, when NASA began employing full-scale virtual mock-ups of space capsules to forecast the performance of machines in outer space.
It has become far too rare for manufacturers’ visions of an IIoT-fueled utopia to survive contact with reality. A Cisco survey finds that nearly 75 percent of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) projects are failing.
As businesses across the globe are returning to work amid the COVID-19 pandemic, many manufacturers are reconsidering policies and procedures to ensure worker safety and adhere to new regulations in the post-pandemic environment.
If you were to rebuild your manufacturing business today, would you build it in the same way, or would you shape it differently to address new challenges and future innovations?
To a discrete manufacturer, process manufacturing is odd territory indeed. It’s a world in which textiles, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, plastics, and food and beverage are produced en masse.