Designfax weekly eMagazine

Subscribe Today!

Archives

View Archives

Partners

Manufacturing Center
Product Spotlight

Modern Applications News
Metalworking Ideas For
Today's Job Shops

Tooling and Production
Strategies for large
metalworking plants

What are Onshape Custom Features?

Certified Onshape Professional Too Tall Toby explains how to supercharge your workflow using community-created tools. In this insightful tutorial, he dives into the world of FeatureScript -- the powerful coding language behind Onshape. Learn where to find new scripts and how to use them. Save time. Learn new skills, shortcuts, and maybe even better ways to do things. Incorporate Custom Features into your everyday work. Very useful.
View the video.

What can you do with touchless magnetic angle sensors?

Novotechnik has put together an informative video highlighting real-world applications for their RFC, RFE, and RSA Series touchless magnetic angle sensors. You may be surprised at the variety of off-highway, marine, material handling, and industrial uses. You'll learn how they work (using a Hall effect microprocessor to detect position) and their key advantages, including eliminated wear and tear on these non-mechanical components. We love when manufacturers provide such useful examples.
View the video.

What can the new Autodesk Inventor AI Assistant do for you?

Autodesk Assistant brings industry-specific context to help execute tasks and orchestrate actions across your 3D models -- not just answer questions. Designed to understand your workflows, Assistant appears as a dockable panel alongside your Inventor workspace and includes the ability to perform complex tasks or gather information from your designs without writing a single line of code. Find out what this new AI "colleague" can do for you.
Watch this informative Autodesk video.

Useful! Snap-together LED enclosure lighting

Seifert StripLite SL 4000 Series LED enclosure lighting provides bright illumination to 700 lumens. On/off switch and motion sensor models are available. Easily daisy chain up to 16 light strips. Magnetic or clip mounting. See video/info on website or contact Bristol Instruments for more information.
Learn about snap-together lighting.

Next-gen multi-touch panels

Beckhoff's Next line of multi-touch control panels and panel PCs is engineered for demanding human-machine interface and control tasks. These panels offer convenient operation with advanced multi-touch technology, a high-quality look and feel, anti-glare and anti-ghosting effects, and a wide choice of formats (from 7 to 23.8 in.) and options. A main draw is the line's attractive pricing.
Learn more.

Most powerful handheld 3D laser scanner on the market

Creaform, a business of AMETEK, has launched HandySCAN 3D|EVO Series, the most powerful handheld 3D laser scanning solution on the market. This innovative series features a built-in touchscreen display and an integrated high-res 12-MP photo camera, incorporating augmented reality (AR) and advanced on-scanner visualization. Users can streamline repetitive inspections and enhance quality control processes using the new auto-alignment feature. Powered by 46 blue laser lines with accuracy of 0.020 mm. The Creaform Metrology Suite includes four application software modules: Scan-to-CAD, Inspection, Automation, and Dynamic Tracking. So many more features.
Learn more.

Continental develops first sensor to measure heat in EV motors

Global automotive supplier Continental has developed a new sensor technology that measures the temperature inside permanently excited synchronous motors in electric vehicles directly on the rotor for the first time.
Read the full article.

LEDs with highest output power available

The new OCI-460 SWIR LED series from EPIGAP OSA Photonics features markedly improved output power compared to the company's previous OCI-480 package and all competitive SMD SWIR LED devices. For example, model OCI-460 ID1550-XS operates at 1,550 nm and features drive current up to 1.5A to deliver approximately 13% higher output efficiency over EPIGAP's OCI-480 package. This impressive advancement features 96% higher output power compared to any other SWIR SMD LED currently on the market. Ideal for use in sensing, machine vision, and more.
Learn more.

AI and collaboration in SOLIDWORKS

Discover AURA, the new AI assistant built into SOLID-WORKS, in this informative video from TriMech Group. What can AURA do for you? It can streamline workflows and make collaborating on and tracking projects even easier, for starters. Other top features of SOLIDWORKS Design 2026 are also covered. Some good tips here.
View the TriMech Group video.

Solutions for weighing and force measurement

Automation-Direct now offers Sensy 2172L series single point, 5510 series shear beam, and 2782 series tension/compression load cells that deliver flexible solutions for weighing and force measurement. They are ideal for applications ranging from small packaging scales to rugged industrial tanks and conveyor systems. Built from aircraft-grade aluminum or stainless steel, these models feature built-in overload protection, accuracies down to 0.03% of full scale, protection ratings up to IP67, and capacities up to 2,000 kg.
Learn more.

Top Product: Future-proof enclosure cooling

Seifert's new SLIMLINE NEO ushers in next-generation industrial cooling with natural refrigerant R290 (GWP 0.02) and high-efficiency inverter technology. It cuts energy costs with EER up to 3.6, reduces refrigerant charge by 75%, and extends electronics life. A fully redesigned, lighter, smaller enclosure delivers lower vibration, better component protection, and easier handling. Available in two elegant surfaces: stainless steel and mild steel, powder coated.
Learn more.

Coin cell supercapacitors: High capacity, quick release

Coin cell supercapa-citors are compact, high-capacity energy storage devices that rapidly charge and discharge and endure far more cycles than rechargeable batteries. They're ideal for high switching loads such as real-time clock and battery back-up power, battery-swap ride-through, and LED or audible alarms. SCHURTER's latest versions support up to 5.5 V and 100 to 1,500 mF.
Learn more.

Tech Tip: Mastering sheet metal bend calculations in Onshape

Mastering bend calculations in sheet metal design is a key skill that can impact the accuracy and manufactur-ability of your designs significantly. Explore the various options available to become a pro in this Onshape Tech Tip: K Factor, bend allowance, and bend deduction, with guidance on when each should be used. You will probably learn something even if you don't use this software.
Read the Onshape blog.

Digital Engineering: How a private jet gets a high-end refurb

Ever wonder how private jets get overhauled from standard OEM layouts to exotic, artful interiors? It takes engineering expertise, specialty design skills, and true craftspeople. Increasingly, it also takes automation provided by middleware to weave a digital thread through CAD, BOM, ERP, and PDM software.
Read the full article.

How AI is quietly transforming simulation

Is AI really useful, or is it just a passing trend? Balavignesh Vemparala, an R&D Engineer II at ANSYS, lays out a compelling case for how artificial intelligence is already hard at work in the simulation world with real results for users. From faster solves to accelerated workflows, improved quality and traceability, generative models, and more, discover what you might be overlooking when it comes to real-world AI application. Worth the read.
Read this informative ANSYS blog.

NIST demonstrates a new 'primary standard' for measuring ultralow pressures

A vacuum chamber is never perfectly empty. A small number of atoms or molecules always remain, and measuring the tiny pressures they exert is critical. For instance, semiconductor manufacturers create microchips in vacuum chambers that must be almost entirely devoid of atomic and molecular contaminants, and so they need to monitor the gas pressure in the chamber to ensure that the contaminant levels are acceptably low.

Now, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have validated a new approach to measuring extremely low gas pressures called CAVS, for cold atom vacuum standard. They have established that their technique can serve as a "primary standard" -- in other words, it can make intrinsically accurate measurements without first needing to be calibrated to reference pressure readings.

Having developed CAVS over the last seven years, NIST researchers recently put their technique through its most rigorous tests to date. Their new study, in the journal AVS Quantum Science, shows that CAVS results agreed with the traditional "gold standard" method for measuring low pressures, demonstrating that this new technique can make measurements with the same degree of accuracy and reliability.

Not only can CAVS make measurements as good as those in traditional pressure gauges, but it can also reliably measure the much lower vacuum pressures -- a trillionth of the Earth's sea-level atmospheric pressure and below -- that will be required for future chip manufacturing and next-generation science. Additionally, its operation, based on well-understood quantum physics principles, means that it can make accurate readings "right out of the box," without requiring any adjustments or calibration to other reference pressure sources or techniques.

"This is the culminating result," said NIST physicist Julia Scherschligt. "We have had numerous positive developments before, but this validates the fact that our cold atom standard is truly a standard."

SETUP: To verify the accuracy of their new approach for measuring ultra-low vacuum pressures, NIST researchers built a high-performance version of a traditional pressure metrology setup, known as a dynamic expansion system. In this system, they injected gas at a flow rate of roughly 10 to 100 billion molecules per second into the top chamber. The gas moved from the upper chamber to the lower chamber, which is evacuated by a large pump, at a known rate through a precisely dimensioned orifice. A set of gauges measured the pressure ratio between the top and bottom chambers to correct for imperfections. Using the flow rate of gas in and the rate that gas moves from between the two chambers, the researchers calculated the pressure in the top chamber, which the CAVS independently measures. The researchers found agreement between this known pressure value and the readings from the CAVS sensors, thereby validating their new method. [Credit: NIST]

In addition to semiconductor manufacturing, the new method can be useful for other applications that require high-vacuum environments, such as quantum computers, gravitational wave detectors, particle accelerators, and many more.

CAVS technology measures vacuum pressures using a cold gas of about a hundred thousand lithium or rubidium atoms trapped in a magnetic field. These atoms fluoresce when illuminated by a laser tuned to just the right frequency. Researchers can count the number of trapped atoms precisely by measuring the intensity of this glow.

When the CAVS sensor is connected to a vacuum chamber, the leftover atoms or molecules in the chamber collide with the trapped atoms. Each collision knocks an atom out of the trap, reducing the number of atoms and the intensity of light emitted. That intensity, easily measured by light sensors, serves as a sensitive measure of pressure. This relationship between the rate of dimming and the number of molecules is predicted exactly by quantum mechanics.

In the new work, the NIST researchers attached their CAVS sensors to the classical gold-standard reference standard for gas pressure, known as a dynamic expansion system.

Dynamic expansion systems work by injecting a known amount of gas, measured in molecules per second, into a vacuum chamber, then slowly removing the gas from the other end of the chamber at a known rate. The researchers then calculate the resulting pressure in the chamber.

In this experiment, the researchers built a high-performance dynamic expansion system that allowed for extremely small flows of gas -- in the range of 10 billion to 100 billion atoms or molecules per second -- and included a custom-built flowmeter to measure flows that low. The hole they built to remove atoms slowly from the chamber was machined to submicrometer precision.

"The heavy lifting needed to stand up one of these classical standard devices is monumental," Scherschligt said. "Going through the effort of doing that really drove home the point of this whole experiment, which is that CAVS provides high accuracy in a much simpler form."

The NIST researchers tested two types of CAVS sensors in their work. One is a laboratory version; the second is a mobile version that can easily be used in advanced chip manufacturing settings.

"Indeed, the portable version is so simple, we eventually decided to automate it such that we very rarely had to intervene in its operation. In fact, most of the data from the portable CAVS for this study was taken while we were comfortably asleep at home," said NIST physicist Dan Barker.

"The gases we measured -- including nitrogen, helium, argon, and even neon -- are all inert semiconductor process gases," said NIST physicist Steve Eckel. "But in the future, we hope to measure more reactive gases like hydrogen, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and oxygen, which are all both common residual gases found in vacuum chambers and useful gases for semiconductor manufacturing."

Together, these CAVS systems promise to help researchers working with ultralow pressures reach new highs in both science and technology.

Read more NIST developments at nist.gov.

Source: NIST

Published August 2023

Rate this article