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Test your knowledge: High-temp adhesives

Put your knowledge to the test by trying to answer these key questions on how to choose the right high-temperature-resistant adhesive. The technical experts from Master Bond cover critical information necessary for the selection process, including questions on glass transition temperature and service temperature range. Some of the answers may surprise even the savviest of engineers.
Take the quiz.

New Air Holster Safety Air Gun Mount

EXAIR's new Model 5930 Air Holster provides a simple and convenient way to keep Safety Air Guns secure and within easy reach at workstations throughout a facility. Designed to give operators a designated location for their air gun when not in use, the Air Holster helps prevent misplaced tools while keeping work areas organized and efficient. Its practical design makes it an ideal addition to manufacturing, assembly, maintenance, and other industrial workstations where Safety Air Guns are frequently used.
Learn more.

Southco access hardware in rail applications

Discover how Southco's rail access hardware solutions help improve safety, reliability, and operational efficiency across modern rail networks. The video showcases a range of rail applications where Southco's access hardware plays a critical role, including driver cabins, lighting systems, tray tables, headrests, armrests, and other passenger and operator touchpoints. Designed to support dependable performance in demanding moving environments, Southco's solutions help operators streamline maintenance processes, minimize downtime, and enable more proactive asset management.
View the video.

Multi-zone tension leveler for hard-to-flatten alloys

Redex USA's Levelflex^® is a modular, multi-zone tension leveler engineered for continuous processing lines, including coating and heat treatment of aluminum alloys and where flatness is critical to coating adhesion and downstream formability. By stretching material within 95% of its yield strength, it corrects stubborn flatness defects in fewer passes. It comes in open-loop pure stretch or closed-loop tension measurement modes to optimize surface integrity and eliminate crossbow.
Learn more.

Hold any shape with ID and OD Form Holding Clamps

These simple OD and ID clamping solutions from Fixtureworks clamp onto your part in one easy operation, eliminating the need for custom fixtures. They allow users to clamp onto the inner or outer diameter of small-size, irregularly shaped work parts fast. Lots of options.
Learn more.

Need inserts? We make it E-Z.

Founded in 1956, E-Z LOK allows users to repair damaged or worn-out threads without the need for special taps or installation tools. Our line of threaded locking inserts is used in metal, plastic, wood, composite, and additive industries. Extensive inventories are maintained in four warehouses across the U.S., and all products are sold through industrial distributors. One source for all your needs!
Learn more
or contact Kyle Lindsly-Roach for free samples at 310.323.5613 x221.

Stop paying the 'assembly tax': Why your next design should be one part not 10

"As metal additive manufacturing (AM) moves from the prototyping lab to mainline production, the most significant ROI isn't found in making parts faster, it's found in making fewer of them." So says Erica Manzella of Go Engineer. Learn about the hidden costs of traditional assembly, the DfAM toolset native to SOLIDWORKS, and the advanced 3DEXPERIENCE optimization tools and industrial metal AM hardware that are making monolithic design a physical reality.
Read the GoEngineer blog.

Best-seller: Copper filament for 3D printing

Virtual Foundry, the company that brought us 3D-printable lunar regolith simulant, says Copper Filamet™ (not a typo) is its best-selling metal filament. This material is compatible with any open-architecture FDM/FFF 3D printer. After sintering, final parts are 100% pure copper. The company says this is one of the easiest materials to print and sinter. Stainless steel, porcelain, aluminum, and titanium available too.
Learn more and get all the specs.

What can replace a coil spring? You've got better options!

Traditional coil springs can limit mechanical designs. Wave springs offer a space-saving alternative, providing equivalent force and deflection in up to half the operating height while reducing assembly size and weight. There are four wave spring types that can replace a coil spring. Learn how each variant delivers unique performance capabilities to optimize space, efficiency, and reliability.
Read this informative NEW Smalley technical article.

Next-gen metal bonding: 3M Scotch-Weld 8500 Series

Replace traditional fasteners and streamline assembly with 3M Scotch-Weld Acrylic Adhesive DP8507NS. Engineered for direct bonding to bare or slightly oily metals with minimal surface prep, this high-performance adhesive withstands paint bake cycles up to 200 C (392 F), resists corrosion, and holds strong down to -40 C. Upgrade durability, aesthetics, and design flexibility. Bonds many plastics too!
View the video.

3 things you need to get right when 3D printing gears

When businesses decide to 3D print their own gears, they can reduce lead times and costs associated with replacements, prototypes, and small-batch production runs significantly. According to the experts at igus, however, "achieving industrial-grade reliability requires more than just a digital file; there are several fundamental technical basics you must master first to ensure your gears can withstand the rigors of real-world use."
Read this informative igus tech tip.

DURACON polymer with 30% recycled content

Daicel Corporation's High Performance Polymers SBU has launched four new DURACON^® POM grades featuring 30% post-consumer recycled (PCR) content. Unveiled at CHINAPLAS 2026, the lineup includes Standard, Low VOC, Sliding, and Tough options. Leveraging advanced compounding expertise, Daicel maintains quality and mechanical performance comparable to standard virgin resin grades for demanding global industrial and automotive components.
Learn more.

Renishaw unveils revolutionary LIBERTAS™ 3DP tech

Renishaw's new LIBERTAS software technology addresses two of the most persistent challenges in metal AM: poor downskin surface finish and the need for support structures. Users have greater freedom to manufacture complex geometries.
Read the full article.

Innovate like a PRO: Protolabs' new AI-enabled manufacturing platform

ProDesk by Protolabs accelerates innovation for product development and procurement teams. It features real-time, AI-powered quoting with design for manufacturability (DFM) analysis across injection molding, CNC machining, and 3D printing. The platform enables seamless team collaboration and customizes quotes with instant feedback on materials, lead times, secondary operations, and finishes prior to production.
Learn more.

SDP/SI Shaftloc Fastening System

Shaftloc is a unique, reusable locking device for securely mounting mechanical components like gears and sprockets onto shafts without the need for keyways, set screws, or adhesives. Its simple, two-piece design offers a cost-effective alternative to traditional fasteners, providing high clamping force and vibration resistance. Installed with standard tools, Shaftloc is perfect for designers seeking flexible, hubless mounting solutions. Available in four styles.
Learn more from SDP/SI.

How some metals fail: High-speed photos illuminate surprising connection to magnets

By combining experimental and theoretical work, researchers discover what happens when metals are stretched to their yield point.

How things deform and break is important for engineers, as it helps them choose and design what materials they're going to use for building things. Researchers at Aalto University and Tampere University (both in Finland) have stretched metal alloy samples to their breaking point and filmed it using ultra-fast cameras to study what happens. Their discoveries have the potential to open up a whole new line of research in the study of materials deformation.

When materials get stretched a bit, they expand, and when the stretching stops, they return to their original size. However, if a material gets stretched a lot, it no longer returns back to its original size. This over-stretching is referred to as "plastic" deformation.

An alloy sample is stretched in front of a laser high-speed camera setup. [Photo credit: Aalto University]

 

 

Materials that have begun to be plastically deformed behave differently when they're stretched even more -- and eventually snap in two. Some materials, including the lightweight aluminum alloys used in high-tech applications like cars and aircraft, start to deform unpredictably when they become plastically deformed.

The specific problem the researchers were interested in solving is called the Portevin-Le Chatelier (PLC) effect, where bands of deformation in the material move as it gets stretched. The movement of these bands causes the unpredictable deformation, and researchers wanted to develop a better understanding of how they moved to be able to predict more readily how these materials would deform.

"There were models for how these materials deformed," said Professor Mikko Alava, the leader of the research group at Aalto, "but until now, they weren't very useful."

To develop the new model, the researchers used very high-speed cameras, illuminated using laser light, to photograph the samples. Once they gathered this data, they were able to see what theoretical models fit the data.

They found that a model for the behavior of magnets, called the ABBM model, could be used to predict the behavior of the materials as they deformed. The ABBM model is well established in materials science for describing the change of magnetization in magnets.

"The art of the theory of this work was realizing which parameters of the material aligned with the parameters in an evolved version of the ABBM model," said Alava, "and then, by gathering the large quantity of data that we did, we were able to show how the model could be used to predict deformation in these materials." The results have been published in Science Advances.

"Until now, the time resolution of the experiments has not been sufficient for comparison with this type of model," said Tero Makinen, doctoral candidate with the major responsibility for study. "The movement of the deformation bands has been studied previously, particularly in the material science community, but one really needs to see the fine detail to be able to show that the bands behave -- in some sense -- similarly to magnets."

"It is quite remarkable that two phenomena which are apparently so different -- change of magnetization in magnets and propagation of deformation bands in alloys -- can be described with the same, simple statistical physics model," says Associate Professor Lasse Laurson from Tampere University, who participated in the study.

The research has been a long time coming.

"I first came up with the general idea around 2015," says Alava, but now that the model has been shown to apply to the PLC effect in aluminum alloys, the group is interested in testing if it applies to a wider range of metal alloys.

"There are several different types of PLC bands that can exist in materials," says Alava. "We've shown it for one type, and now we want to see if it applies to all of them."

Source: Aalto University

Published November 2020

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