May 7, 2019

What suppliers are doing to ensure product quality and safety By Mark Shortt, Design-2-Part Magazine Talk to any qualified supplier of aerospace parts and they will likely tell you the same thing: Quality needs to be the top priority for manufacturing. All stakeholders—from prime contractors to tier-3 suppliers, contract manufacturers, and job shops—know it because the safety of aircraft passengers depends on it. But today, jet makers are working to solve an engineering and manufacturing riddle that goes something like this: “How do you achieve the highest quality requirements when aircraft materials, parts, and production processes are now more complex, and more challenging, than ever?” Monitoring and Controlling the Process Aero Gear (www.aerogear.com) manufactures precision gears and gearbox assemblies used by aerospace giants like Pratt & Whitney, Sikorsky, Boeing, and General Electric. Last June, the company completed a 24,000-square-foot addition to its facility that Aero Gear President Doug Rose said was necessary to keep pace with the industry’s robust demand for jet engines, the primary application for its parts and assemblies. The addition increased Aero Gear’s total space to approximately 100,000 square feet, which includes manufacturing space for several new programs. “We’re a small company, but we have a big impact on the industry because our gears out there flying in commercial and military aircraft, in thousands of planes a day,” Rose said in an interview at Aero Gear’s facility in Windsor, Connecticut. “We started out as just a local shop making parts for companies like Pratt & Whitney, and then, as globalization came about, we embraced it and went looking for opportunities. Now, we do 30 percent of our work internationally, exporting.” Rose said that Aero Gear ensures the highest quality of its parts by carefully controlling and monitoring its processes. A quality control person is embedded in each manufacturing cell to make sure the process is consistently producing good parts, and to document that the parts are free of defects. It’s a far cry, he said, from the old school practice of waiting until all the parts have been machined before inspecting them at the end of the process. To help make the inspection process less manually intensive, the company invested in white...

Apr 12, 2019

By Dan Jamieson, Manufacturing.net Sixty percent of global manufacturers will use analytic data recorded from embedded devices to optimize manufacturing and supply-chain operations by 2021, according to market intelligence firm IDC. That’s because small, inexpensive computing hardware (such as low-cost wireless radios and sensors) can wirelessly monitor and transmit data instantly on the state of any machine. In fact, with the perpetual mandate to cut costs, operate more efficiently, achieve greater visibility into processes and minimize supply-chain risk, all manufacturers should begin investing in IoT technologies—if they aren’t doing so already. IoT’s many benefits can transform your business and set you apart from your competitors. There are risks, to be sure, but they can be mitigated so long as the project is carefully and deliberately managed. Fortunately, that’s what competitive manufacturers are already good at. First, let’s take a look at the value the IoT can bring to your manufacturing floor, where seamless operations depend on reliably functioning machinery. Increase Visibility and Simplify Operations Smart industrial appliances can help increase visibility and simplify business operations: Increase visibility — With smart sensors, businesses can monitor important assets at every stage of the supply chain and report this information to a centralized database. Simplify operations — Businesses can use smart sensors to locate and assess inventory levels. Predictive Maintenance Capabilities Can Mitigate Disruptions Furthermore, manufacturers can eliminate error-prone service inspections with IoT technology. For example, smart sensors can anticipate problems before they become larger issues by relaying real-time analytics on a machine’s performance. Data collected from a machine, such as current or vibration, combined with real-time alerts allows manufacturers to engage in predictive maintenance, minimizing disruptions and work stoppages, which in turn increases asset utilization and mitigates the risk of missed deadlines, increases in production costs and reputational damage. In this scenario, best practices call for integrating a wireless connectivity module (Cellular or Wi-Fi-enabled, aka a smart sensor) that can communicate the status of the machine and its parts to humans on a cloud-based interface. These connectivity modules can also send and receive over-the-air (OTA) software updates even after the device has been deployed. A use case such as the one described above can yield the following benefits: Enhanced...

Mar 20, 2019

“Desktop Metal Introduces New, Enhanced Model to Production System Platform” Featured on D2pMagazine. com Company anticipates first shipments to start in 1st Quarter of 2019 FRANKFURT, Germany—A larger build envelope and faster printing speed are among the new advancements that Desktop Metal has made to its Production System™, a metal 3D printing system that the company calls “the fastest metal printer in the world.” Desktop Metal’s new Production System™ has a 225 percent larger build envelope (750mm x 330mm x 250mm) and a 50 percent increase in print speed to 12,000 cm3/hour, the company said in a press release. Desktop Metal (www.Desktopmetal.com) made the announcement before previewing a broad range of metal 3D printed parts at Formnext 2018, an international trade show for additive manufacturing. The first installation of the Production System is scheduled to take place during the first quarter of 2019 at a Fortune 500 company. Additional customer installations at major automotive, heavy duty, and leading metal parts manufacturers will follow throughout 2019, with broad availability in 2020, the company said.   “As we continue to expand our list of global customers and partners, companies that are turning to the game-changing technology available with the Production System, and installations set to begin rolling out in the coming months, Desktop Metal is looking to further shift the industry beyond prototyping to now include full-scale metal manufacturing, said Ric Fulop, CEO and co-founder of Desktop Metal, in a statement. Powered by Single Pass Jetting™ technology, the Production System is said to be the first and only metal 3D printing system for mass production that delivers the speed, quality, and cost-per-part needed to compete with traditional manufacturing processes. It is also reported to be more than four times faster than competing binder jet processes and 100 times faster than laser-based systems. The improved system includes two full-width print bars, advanced powder spreaders, and an anti-ballistic system that spread powder and print in a single quick pass across the build area. According to Desktop Metal, it is the most sophisticated single-pass inkjet printhead ever installed in a binder jet system. The system uses 32,768 piezo inkjet nozzles that enable a broad range of binder chemistries to print an...

Mar 7, 2019

By Heriot-Watt University Featured on Phys.org Scientists from Heriot-Watt University have welded glass and metal together using an ultrafast laser system, in a breakthrough for the manufacturing industry. arious optical materials such as quartz, borosilicate glass and even sapphire were all successfully welded to metals like aluminium, titanium and stainless steel using the Heriot-Watt laser system, which provides very short, picosecond pulses of infrared light in tracks along the materials to fuse them together. The new process could transform the manufacturing sector and have direct applications in the aerospace, defence, optical technology and even healthcare fields. Professor Duncan Hand, director of the five-university EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Laser-based Production Processes based at Heriot-Watt, said: “Traditionally it has been very difficult to weld together dissimilar materials like glass and metal due to their different thermal properties—the high temperatures and highly different thermal expansions involved cause the glass to shatter. “Being able to weld glass and metals together will be a huge step forward in manufacturing and design flexibility. “At the moment, equipment and products that involve glass and metal are often held together by adhesives, which are messy to apply and parts can gradually creep, or move. Outgassing is also an issue—organic chemicals from the adhesive can be gradually released and can lead to reduced product lifetime. “The process relies on the incredibly short pulses from the laser. These pulses last only a few picoseconds—a picosecond to a second is like a second compared to 30,000 years. “The parts to be welded are placed in close contact, and the laser is focused through the optical material to provide a very small and highly intense spot at the interface between the two materials—we achieved megawatt peak power over an area just a few microns across. “This creates a microplasma, like a tiny ball of lightning, inside the material, surrounded by a highly-confined melt region. “We tested the welds at -50C to 90C and the welds remained intact, so we know they are robust enough to cope with extreme conditions.” Read more...

Feb 19, 2019

“Disruptive Technologies Are Changing Automakers’ Needs, Creating Opportunities for Suppliers” Autonomous, electric, and connected vehicles require new designs, new suppliers By Mark Shortt, Design-2-Part Magazine   Carmakers in North America, Europe, and Asia are doing a lot of things today that they’ve never done, or even attempted to do, before. When you consider that the crown jewel of their research and development efforts—self-driving cars—is rewriting the rules of how cars are designed, manufactured, and used, that starts to make more sense. “When you look at autonomous driving, it still is amazing to me that you could sit in a car and it drives itself,” said Ken Beller, vice president of sales and marketing at The Weiss-Aug Group, a group of manufacturing companies headquartered in East Hanover, New Jersey. “It stops at red lights and parks itself, and that’s truly amazing.” Self-driving, or autonomous, cars are part of a larger trend currently sweeping the global automotive industry: the development of what are known as ACES—automated, connected, electric, and shared—vehicles. In a major announcement last March, General Motors said that it plans to begin producing self-driving cars, without steering wheels or pedals, in 2019. Along with the car, GM plans to start a commercial service centered on an app that enables people to hail rides. General Motors said that the car, the Cruise AV (autonomous vehicle), is based on its Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicle (EV). It will be produced at the same plant where the Bolt EV is produced—GM’s Orion Township plant in Michigan. GM took a major step toward commercialization of the vehicle after it acquired Cruise Automation, a San Francisco-based developer of autonomous vehicle technology, in 2016. The car is part of GM’s efforts to enable a future with “zero crashes, zero emissions, and zero congestion.” General Motors’ efforts to commercialize autonomous cars at scale were bolstered last May, when the SoftBank Vision Fund announced that it would invest $2.25 billion in GM Cruise Holdings LLC (GM Cruise). In a statement announcing the funding, Michael Ronen, managing partner of SoftBank Investment Advisers, said that “GM has made significant progress toward realizing the dream of completely automated driving to dramatically reduce fatalities, emissions, and congestion. The GM Cruise...