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Siemens Meet at the Machine: Be productive from day one of new CNC machine delivery

Traditionally, many programming, validation, and training activities begin only after a machine is installed. Not anymore. Meet at the Machine is Siemens' new initiative uniting machine builders, software, and automation for next-level CNC through a continuous digital thread across engineering, programming, virtual validation, and execution. By pairing a Digital Twin with Digital CNC powered by SINUMERIK, manufacturers can prepare, validate, train, and optimize workflows before your specialized machine's physical delivery! TRAK Machine Tools is the launch partner -- see what they are doing.
Learn more.

How to master metal powder management in 3D printing

What's the real cost of "good enough" powder tracking for powder-bed fusion 3D-printing machines? According to Tim Wischeropp, CEO and Co-Founder of amsight, the technology is rife with hidden costs. Every cycle, every handling step, every exposure, and every mixing decision plays a part. Surprisingly, though, with the right strategy, users can turn their losses into a competitive edge. Learn how.
Read the full article.

Aluminum oxide filament for FDM printers

Virtual Foundry, the company that brought us 3D-printable lunar regolith simulant, has a new product called Aluminum Oxide Filamet™, giving users the power to print alumina parts using the FDM printers they already own. This composite 3D-printing material allows researchers, engineers, and makers to bypass expensive ceramic tooling and produce pure ceramic components in-house. Print using a 0.6-mm hardened-steel, standard-flow nozzle on virtually any open-architecture printer.
Get all the material specs.

New metal extrusion retrofit system helps manufacturers get into ShAPE

A new invention from the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory could soon help manufacturers more easily adopt the lab's patented Shear Assisted Processing and Extrusion (ShAPE™) technology, enabling faster manufacturing of superior extrusion products while reducing costs and energy use.
Read the full article.

Pneumatics: Dual guide rod cylinders and exhaust silencers

Automation-Direct has expanded its guided actuator lineup with compact 12-mm dual guide rod cylinders from Metal Work. Ideal for packaging and material handling, these double-acting cylinders feature 10-mm to 250-mm strokes, magnetic pistons, and integral sensor slots. Additionally, new durable acetal plastic silencers are now available in multiple NPT/BSPP sizes to reduce pneumatic exhaust noise.
Learn more.

Expanded injection molding capabilities

Pexco LLC has acquired Recto Molded Products and Legacy Extrusions, expanding its capabilities in complex injection molding, tooling, assembly, and engineered thermoplastic solutions for OEM manufacturers. The Cincinnati-based companies bring more than a century of manufacturing expertise, advanced production technologies, and value-added services that strengthen Pexco's ability to support customers from product design through full-scale production. Injection molding presses ranging from 55 to 500 tons.
Learn about Pexco and its value-added manufacturing services.

Custom 3D-printed steering wheel for jet dragster

Jet dragsters use General Electric J85 engines -- the same turbines pulled from U.S. military F5 Freedom Fighters -- mounted to a custom 26-ft chassis. The racers achieve quarter-miles in 5.5 sec, but standard metal parts can fail custom ergonomic needs. Traditional manufacturing of low-volume aluminum steering wheels demands long, 8-day lead times, high costs, and multi-piece assemblies. Larsen Motorsports solved this by replacing metal with continuous fiber 3D printing using the Markforged X7. Embedding continuous carbon fiber into an Onyx nylon matrix allowed them to target specific load paths, delivering a custom steering wheel that is stiffer, lighter, and faster to produce than aluminum.
View the video.

Application Spotlight: Light-duty ring in an air vent nozzle

Explore how a light-duty Spirolox^® retaining ring is used in an airplane air vent nozzle to regulate airflow. This application spotlight shows how the ring fits into a groove in the plastic housing, securing the nozzle during rotation. Designed for light loads and axial positioning, it offers a simple, economical solution that is easy to install and remove.
View this informative Smalley video.

Fasteners for automotive and agricultural equipment

Norm Fasteners has acquired an automotive fastener manufacturing plant in Plymouth, MI, expanding its North American footprint beyond sales, engineering, and logistics. The local facility produces metric fasteners (M4-M24) and engine bolts. Norm’s portfolio includes wheel bolts, studs, custom fasteners, and licensed MAThread^® and TAPTITE^® products, serving diverse automotive and industrial assembly needs.
Learn more or contact Belgin Tunce for more information.

3M Cooling Film for vehicle roofs launched

New 3M Cooling Film is a roof-applied heat-management solution designed to help keep vehicle cabins cooler, reduce cooling demand, and improve operational efficiency. The aftermarket product uses advanced thermal management technology to reflect more than 85% of solar radiation. Interior vehicle temperatures can be reduced by up to 10 degrees F with this product. Installs like graphics by professional installers using 3M adhesive technologies. Initially designed for fleet and rail operators.
Learn more.

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.

Salty gel could harvest water from desert air, exhibits record vapor absorption

By Jennifer Chu, MIT

MIT engineers have synthesized a super-absorbent material that can soak up a record amount of moisture from the air, even in desert-like conditions.

As the material absorbs water vapor, it can swell to make room for more moisture. Even in very dry conditions, with 30% relative humidity, the material can pull vapor from the air and hold in the moisture without leaking. The water could then be heated and condensed, then collected as ultra-pure water.

The transparent, rubbery material is made from hydrogel, a naturally absorbent material that is also used in disposable diapers. The team enhanced the hydrogel's absorbency by infusing it with lithium chloride -- a type of salt that is known to be a powerful dessicant.

MIT engineers have synthesized a super-absorbent material that can soak up a record amount of moisture from the air, even in desert-like conditions. Pictured are the hydrogel discs swollen in water. [Credit: Gustav Graeber and Carlos D. Diaz-Marin/MIT]

 

 

 

 

The researchers found they could infuse the hydrogel with more salt than was possible in previous studies. As a result, they observed that the salt-loaded gel absorbed and retained an unprecedented amount of moisture, across a range of humidity levels, including very dry conditions that have limited other material designs.

If it can be made quickly, and at large scale, the super-absorbent gel could be used as a passive water harvester, particularly in the desert and drought-prone regions, where the material could continuously absorb vapor, that eventually could then be condensed into drinking water. The researchers also envision that the material could be fit onto air conditioning units as an energy-saving, dehumidifying element.

"We've been application-agnostic, in the sense that we mostly focus on the fundamental properties of the material," says Carlos Díaz-Marin, a mechanical engineering graduate student and member of the Device Research Lab at MIT. "But now we are exploring widely different problems like how to make air conditioning more efficient and how you can harvest water. This material, because of its low cost and high performance, has so much potential."

Díaz-Marin and his colleagues have published their results in a paper appearing in Advanced Materials. The study's MIT co-authors are Gustav Graeber, Leon Gaugler, Yang Zhong, Bachir El Fil, Xinyue Liu, and Evelyn Wang.

"Best of both worlds"
In MIT's Device Research Lab, researchers are designing novel materials to solve the world's energy and water challenges. In looking for materials that can help to harvest water from the air, the team zeroed in on hydrogels -- slippery, stretchy gels that are mostly made from water and a bit of cross-linked polymer. Hydrogels have been used for years as absorbent material in diapers because they can swell and soak up a large amount of water when it comes in contact with the material.

"Our question was, how can we make this work just as well to absorb vapor from the air?" Díaz-Marin says.

He and his colleagues dug through the literature and found that others had experimented with mixing hydrogels with various salts. Certain salts, such as the rock salt used to melt ice, are very efficient at absorbing moisture, including water vapor, and the best among them is lithium chloride, a salt that is capable of absorbing over 10 times its own mass in moisture. Left in a pile on its own, lithium chloride could attract vapor from the air, though the moisture would only pool around the salt, with no means of retaining the absorbed water.

So, the researchers attempted to infuse the salt into hydrogel -- producing a material that could both hold in moisture and swell to accommodate more water.

"It's the best of both worlds," says Graeber, who is now a principal investigator at Humboldt University in Berlin. "The hydrogel can store a lot of water, and the salt can capture a lot of vapor. So, it's intuitive that you'd want to combine the two."

Time to load
But the MIT team found that others reached a limit to the amount of salt they could load into their gels. The best-performing samples to date were hydrogels that were infused with 4 to 6 grams of salt per gram of polymer. These samples absorbed about 1.5 grams of vapor per gram of material in dry conditions of 30% relative humidity.

In most studies, researchers had previously synthesized samples by soaking hydrogels in salty water and waiting for the salt to infuse into the gels. Most experiments ended after 24 to 48 hours, as researchers found the process was too slow, and not very much salt ended up in the gels. When they tested the resulting material's ability to absorb water vapor, the samples soaked up very little, as they contained little salt to absorb the moisture in the first place.

What would happen if the material synthesis was allowed to go on, say, for days, and even weeks? Could a hydrogel absorb even more salt, if given enough time? For an answer, the MIT team carried out experiments with polyacrylamide (a common hydrogel) and lithium chloride (a super-absorbent salt). After synthesizing tubes of hydrogel through standard mixing methods, the researchers sliced the tubes into thin disks and dropped each disk into a solution of lithium chloride with a different salt concentration. They took the disks out of solution each day to weigh them and determine the amount of salt that had infused into the gels, then returned them to their solutions.

In the end, they found that, indeed, given more time, hydrogels took up more salt. After soaking in salty solution for 30 days, hydrogels incorporated up to 24 grams, versus the previous record of 6 grams of salt per gram of polymer.

The team then put various samples of the salt-laden gels through absorption tests across a range of humidity conditions. They found that the samples could swell and absorb more moisture at all humidity levels, without leaking. Most notably, the team reports that at very dry conditions of 30% relative humidity, the gels captured a "record-breaking" 1.79 grams of water per gram of material.

"Any desert during the night would have that low relative humidity, so conceivably, this material could generate water in the desert," says Díaz-Marin, who is now looking for ways to speed up the material's super-absorbent properties.

"The big, unexpected surprise was that, with such a simple approach, we were able to get the highest vapor uptake reported to date," Graeber says. "Now, the main focus will be kinetics and how quickly we can get the material to uptake water. That will allow you to cycle this material very quickly, so that instead of recovering water once a day, you could harvest water maybe 24 times a day."

This research was supported, in part, by the U.S. Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Published July 2023

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