Schaeffler Technologies AG saw an opportunity to improve manufacturing throughput and reduce the required cell footprint of certain automated tasks.
Changes in technology are spurring manufacturing to expand in the U.S., speakers said this week at a trade show.
FANUC America, a leading supplier of CNCs, robotics and ROBOMACHINEs, announced a West Campus expansion that will push its operational space in Oakland County, Michigan to nearly two million square feet.
Machining aerospace materials is a challenging task. Not only are machining operations tightly controlled, a wide variety of workpiece materials are employed, including aluminum, titanium, and carbon-fiber reinforced plastics (CFRPs). The following is a brief guide to cutting tool options for successful machining of airframe components. All of the tools referenced are manufactured by Mitsubishi Materials.
Even though it’s been around since the 1950s, when engineering-grade resins were first introduced, many manufacturers still are not familiar with the many benefits that metal-to-plastic conversion provides.
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.
When Desktop Metal introduced its “office-friendly” Studio metal prototype printer earlier this year, the company renewed attention on the issue of safer materials for binder jetting, an additive manufacturing method.
Basic trends in modern manufacturing are driving growth in 3D optical metrology. “One is the highly complex and high-tech material that manufacturers are using today. For example, in the aerospace turbine blade market, they simply cannot touch the part like they used to—the surface finish of the material is too readily affected by any kind of contact metrology."
Four universities—Iowa State University, University of Minnesota, University of Wisconsin-Madison and North Dakota State University (NDSU)—competed in the inaugural 3M Industrial Adhesives and Tapes Disruptive Design Challenge (DDC) at 3M’s headquarters (St. Paul, MN), Friday, April 13.
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.
