Future of Engineering

You can't stop babies from pulling your necklace and putting it in their mouth. But it's unsafe to let them carry on. So you take the road most travelled by moms - quit wearing jewels till the kids grow up. That's a tough decision for a fashion consious mom.

Dentist Helen Bloom Smith decided to take the road less travelled when she spotted the teething problems of her twin nephews. Her decision has led to the creation of Dr. Bloom Inc., a company that manufactures original teething and nursing jewelry known today as Dr. Bloom’s Chewable Jewels ™.

"This teething jewelry is made of food-safe silicone, the same material used to make baby bottles and teething toys. It is designed to look like sleek resin or stone, but gently give way on baby's gums and are dishwasher-safe.

All of the parts, even the cording that holds the pendants, are made of products approved by the Food and Drug Administration and are free of latex and phthalates, controversial chemicals used in plastics that some say are linked to hormone disruptions and other health problems."

Individual necklaces cost $16, sets of three bracelets cost $18, a bracelet-necklace combo costs $19 and a bracelet-keychain pairing costs $20. Check out her site to get info about the various product options, colors and packages.

Smith runs the company Dr.Bloom Inc., along with sister Joy Bloom Wright and friend Mary Wheeler Settlemier. Having tasted success in her first venture, she hopes to expand this feature into other safe baby products.

Smith's venture proves yet again that 'the road not taken has made all the difference'.

Source - Nola.com

Labels: Design-Engineering, Manufacturing-Production-Engineering

New inspection X-ray technology developed by European researchers is helping to ensure that the only thing in people’s dinners is the food itself.

A perfect dinner at home can be spoiled when you start seeing things that you aren't supposed to see. I'm not talking about spooky sixth sense stuff here. It's about the plate in front of you.

What you see is not what you always get when you open food packed in containers. You order a boneless fillet but find a fish bone in it. Small foreign bodies and packaging defects are frequently not detected by food producers, but things could change with the new X-ray technology.

"The technology developed by the Modulinspex project uses low-energy X-rays to produce highly detailed images of food products and packaged goods. The images are then scanned via inspection software that can automatically detect any irregularities accurately and quickly.

The X-ray images have a resolution of 0.1 millimetres – 16 times better than existing high-power systems, making it possible to detect objects as small and fine as a herring bone."

The technology is similar to the X-ray inspection systems used in airports. In the food industry, the system is customized for various foods as the requirements of the food products varies significantly.

This X-ray inspection is sure to improve the quality of the food on your plate. And what you see is what you'll get. There would be no surprises.

Source - Science Daily

Labels: Manufacturing-Production-Engineering

The major difference between a living and an inanimate object is its ability to reproduce itself. This theory is shattered with the arrival of RepRap (Replicating Rapid-prototyper). It's a machine that can replicate itself. 100 researchers have worked on this project since 2004 and have now showcased their product at the Cheltenham Science Festival in the UK.

Image - RepRap
Adrian Bowyer (left) and Vik Olliver (right) with a parent RepRap machine, made on a conventional rapid prototyper, and the first complete working child RepRap machine, made by the RepRap on the left. The child machine made its first successful grandchild part at 14:00 hours UTC on 29 May 2008 at Bath University in the UK, a few minutes after it was assembled.

RepRap is the first 3D printer that can reproduce its own components. Instead of printing on bits of paper this 3D printer makes real, mechanical parts. The existing technology costs $30,000. The RepRap team has cut down the cost by designing a cheaper machine. Their version which is available for free under the GNU General Public Licence can be built within $400.

People already "run their own CD burners, printing presses and photographic laboratories", said Adrian Bowyer, the University of Bath mechanical engineer who launched the RepRap project. "There's no reason they shouldn't run their own factories as well."

Find more information, including instructions for building your own replicating RepRap printer at RepRap.org

Labels: Instrumentation-Engineering, Manufacturing-Production-Engineering

Keynote speaker Brian Gladden offered some thought-provoking insights into global trends at the recent Plastics News Executive Forum. The president and chief executive officer of Sabic Innovative Plastics LP touched on globalization, future growth, feedstock and energy costs, sustainability and human capital issues, while also suggesting some keys for succeeding in the North American market.

The industry is facing tremendous challenges with sustainability and rising pressure by environmentalists and politicians who want to ban plastics. In the face of this, Gladden suggests four keys to winning the game in the United States

Innovating

Playing global

Finding value-added niches

Driving productivity

More from here

Labels: Chemical-Engineering, Manufacturing-Production-Engineering

Preciosion engineers help turn ideas into cost-effective reality through equipment design.Take, for example, the semiconductor industry. Its contribution is not in one specific invention but in fitting all the pieces of the puzzle that makes the automated integrated circuit (IC) manufacturing process so smooth-flowing, at a low cost. It explains why a laptop today costs under $2,000 and is so fast, compared to the 1990s, when a laptop cost easily above $10,000.

Some developments have been: development of a sol-gel-based multi-layer coating which made laundry irons scratch-proof and which was commercialised by electronics giant Philips in its laundry iron products; the world's first ultra-precision machining method using diamond cutters to carve steel into moulds to optical quality with the finest possible smoothness. This has reduced the manufacturing cost of contact ; liquid forging - doing away with traditional die-cast methods and making stronger components in the process; in-situ X-ray measurement, where a team is developing high-speed software resolution of images.

More from here

Labels: Manufacturing-Production-Engineering

A report emanated from the Norwegian Oil Industry Association (OLF) and bore the title “Potential Value of Integrated-Operations on the Norwegian Shelf.” OLF released the report in 2006.

The report found if oil and gas companies active in the Norwegian shelf quickly were to integrate their operations, they could increase their revenues from the shelf by $41.5 billion. If they do not, they can expect to miss $10 billion in potential revenues within the next three years alone. These staggering figures reflect an array of challenges the industry faces and the scale of the prize at stake.

Although the prescribed solution to these challenges goes under different names—Integrated Operations (Statoil), eOperations (Hydro), Smart Field (Shell), Field of the Future (BP), and i-field (Chevron)—the key elements are broadly the same.

More from here

Labels: Energy-Environment-Engineering, Manufacturing-Production-Engineering

The Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME) announced a new initiative called Innovations That Could Change The Way You Manufacture.

The Innovations initiative was born out of a series of meetings, e-mail exchanges and other communications between SME's Technical Community Network (TCN) and the larger manufacturing community

These innovations include:

 Direct Digital Manufacturing (DDM)
 Ultracapacitors
 Self-Assembling Nanotechnology
 Intelligent Device Integration (IDI) and
 Integrated 3-D Simulation And Modeling

More from here

Labels: Automation, Manufacturing-Production-Engineering

In 2007, Dr Babak Amir Parviz was chosen by the MIT Technology as one of the top innovators under the age of 35, for developing the self-assembly manufacturing method.

You can find excerpts from an interview with him on nanotechnology and self assembly. Some interesting questions were asked and answered on self-assembly.

Full interview here

Labels: Manufacturing-Production-Engineering, Material-Sciences

A University of Texas at Dallas team will play a key role in a new $15 million research project designed to enable manufacturing at an almost unimaginably small scale: one atom at a time. This breakthrough technology will make it possible to manufacture devices with atomic precision by exploiting our established ability to remove individual hydrogen atoms from a silicon surface using a scanning tunneling microscope.

Known as atomically precise manufacturing, the technique is expected to enable a wide variety of devices and products, including:

* Ultra-low-power semiconductors for cellphones and other wireless communications
* Sensors with ultra-high sensitivity
* Data encryption orders of magnitude more secure than existing technology
* Optical elements that enable unprecedented performance in computing and communications
* Customized surfaces
* Nanoscale genomics arrays that would enable a person’s complete genetic sequence to be read in less than two hours

More from here

Labels: Manufacturing-Production-Engineering, Material-Sciences

More from the interview here

Labels: Manufacturing-Production-Engineering

The Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME) announced a new initiative called Innovations That Could Change The Way You Manufacture. This member-driven initiative outlines the emerging technologies that are making a positive impact on manufacturing. It also provides an educational framework for SME members and manufacturing practitioners to keep up-to-date on the industry's latest and greatest innovations. These innovations, which include such "what's hot" advancements as Direct Digital Manufacturing (DDM); "what's now" like self- assembling nanotechnology and "what's green or eco-friendly" like ultracapacitors will be showcased at the upcoming Competitive Manufacturers Conference. The Conference, scheduled for June 17-19 at the Chicago Marriott Schaumburg, is designed to connect manufacturing professionals to leading industry experts.

The Innovations initiative was born out of a series of meetings, e-mail exchanges and other communications between SME's Technical Community Network (TCN) and the larger manufacturing community. The TCN requested nominations for ideas from the community, kept some and eliminated others, and then presented its findings to SME's Manufacturing Enterprise Council (MEC) for review. The Council collaboratively selected five "innovations that could change the way you manufacture" based on such criteria as universality across industries, positive impact on manufacturing, current availability for integration, and overall industry value. These innovations include:
o Direct Digital Manufacturing (DDM)
o Ultracapacitors o Self-Assembling Nanotechnology
o Intelligent Device Integration (IDI)
o Integrated 3-D Simulation
o Modeling/Desktop Super Computers...

Full report here

Related blogposts
Biodegradable Plastic Markets with high growths to 2015 over 6 Billion US Dollar and 12.5 bn 2025

Labels: Industrial-Engineering, Manufacturing-Production-Engineering

A new report published today identifies and describes research and development priorities for the future of three critical, high-tech U.S. manufacturing areas – hydrogen energy technologies, nanomanufacturing, and intelligent and integrated manufacturing. The report, Manufacturing the Future: Federal Priorities for Manufacturing R&D, was prepared by the Interagency Working Group (IWG) on Manufacturing R&D of the National Science and Technology Council’s (NSTC) Committee on Technology.

Competing successfully in today’s fast-paced global community requires rapid innovation, research and production methods to cost-effectively bring products to market. The report describes the significance of each of the three critical manufacturing R&D areas, details the challenges essential for progress, discusses existing interagency collaborations and provides recommendations for future research.

These manufacturing areas also correspond to existing priorities established by the federal government through the President’s Hydrogen Fuel Initiative, the National Nanotechnology Initiative and the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Program.

More from this report

Labels: Manufacturing-Production-Engineering

The sad consequences of manufacturing’s scale is that it defaults to the least common denominator.

Customization as a manufacturing process has not moved much beyond Henry Ford’s Model T color. True customization means materializing one’s own designs, one’s own imagination.

How does this different kind of manufacturing integreate with design and digital arts? It relies on “toolkits” consisting of digital software and hardware, fab machines, CNC “Robodrills” and 3D modeling. As importantly, the toolkits are also the far-flung networked communities of craftspeople and designers, artists and technologists sharing ideas and insights

The “tooling” for this practice includes open-source firmware for inexpensive microcontroller-based kits like the Arduino; hacked Nintendo Wii controllers; low-cost, rapid-turnaround printed circuit board production houses; free development environments like Processing; online knowledge sharing communities; parts suppliers with no minimum orders, and so forth.

Digital art is ready to move beyond the confines of keyboard, screen and mouse. If there is a “new materiality” to digital arts, it will emphasize material interactions in physical space, embodied experiences and contexts beyond the typically sedentary confines of the screen/keyboard/mouse/network assemblage.

More from here

Labels: Design-Engineering, Manufacturing-Production-Engineering

Product-development planning remains crucial to organizations' survival and prosperity. Here we revisit some key trends in the process, based on a recent address from one of the world's leading experts in the field of engineered product development.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management Deputy Dean Steven Eppinger, whose textbook Product Design and Development is used by university students all over the world, recently identified and discussed with Eng-Tips.com what he sees as the top six trends and innovations in product development.

His list of trends, based on a transcript from the recent Eng-Tips.com interview:

1. Development Speed occurs more quickly through digital design, analysis and collaboration tools to get products to market faster.
2. Platform Flexibility results from using modular product architecture to provide more product variety to customers.
3. Complexity Management involves engineering complex systems through analysis of interaction networks.
4. Outsourcing and Offshoring permit optimizing supplier skills and capacity, international operations and new markets.
5. Lean Principles allow for improving product development’s efficiency by applying lean production ideas to the organization’s design process.
6. Customer Involvement becomes more easily achieved by using the Internet to bring customers’ ideas into the product design process.

Full details here

Labels: Design-Engineering, Manufacturing-Production-Engineering

Tata Group's (India) “one-lakh” or $2,500 car, launched in Jan 2008, showcased the ability of Tata – and, more broadly, India’s emerging carmakers – to develop, engineer, launch, and sell a car at rock-bottom cost, allowing for entry-level costs affordable to the developing world’s legions of new carbuyers.

Established carmakers continue to find ways of saving costs in every part of the production process. At its Takaoka site in Japan, Toyota – the industry’s most admired manufacturer – is building a plant whose lines will be half the length of their predecessors, but be able to produce eight rather than three models, says Andrew Lee, research analyst with automotive consultancy Frost & Sullivan.

Bosch, the German automotive and industrial group, estimates low-cost vehicles priced at less than €7,000 ($10,600) could reach a 13 per cent share of the world market – or about 10m vehicles – in 2010. Toyota, Renault/Nissan, and other big carmakers are developing cars for the segment. India has riveted the global industry’s attention on the low-cost market recently for three reasons.

Full story here

Labels: Manufacturing-Production-Engineering