With today’s focus on lightweighting, hollow parts made from composite materials—such as ducting, fuel tanks, mandrels, and rocket shrouds—are in higher demand than ever before.
Steve Pollack had just about reached early retirement age when longtime friend and colleague Joe DeSimone asked him to join Carbon, his startup 3D printing company.
Unplanned downtime and production loss due to equipment failure is one of the leading losses for manufacturers. Most shops perform maintenance on a fixed schedule or on failure. This means a machine will be maintained regardless of how often it is used and unexpected breakdowns will stop production.
Methods Machine Tools Inc. (Sudbury, MA), a leading supplier of precision machine tools, 3D printing technology and automation, recently introduced an automation cell designed to greatly boost 3D manufacturing throughput.
Mazak Corp. (Florence, KY) continues its steady advance toward the complete factory digitization of all its manufacturing operations with the recent transformation of its Oguchi, Japan, facility into yet another Mazak iSMART Factory.
Airbus has achieved a 3D printing first with the installation of a 3D printed titanium bracket on a series production commercial aircraft. Manufactured by Arconic, a global technology, engineering, and advanced manufacturing company, the 3D printed titanium bracket was installed on a series production Airbus commercial aircraft, the A350 XWB.
LUBECK, GERMANY, June 19, 2017 – SLM Solutions Group AG, a leading supplier of metal-based additive manufacturing technology, signed a long-term cooperation agreement with BeamIT S.p.a., which is based in Fornovo di Taro, Italy. The cooperation concerns the joint development and testing of various parameters for setting the machines when using various metal powders.
Simulation tools are making it much easier for manufacturers to optimize their processes, visualizing the entire path of production from NC metalcutting simulations through 3D design and factory-floor imaging.
As additive manufacturing emerges from a long infancy, the industry is grappling with a key challenge: A file format and design tools from the 20th century are being asked to do 21st century jobs.
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.
