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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.

New research shows why you don't need to be perfect to get some jobs done in the long run

When neuroscientists think about the strategy an animal might use to carry out a task -- like finding food, hunting prey, or navigating a maze -- they often propose a single model that lays out the best way for the animal to accomplish the job.

However, in the real world, animals -- and humans -- may not use the optimal way, which can be resource intensive. Instead, they use a strategy that's good enough to do the job but takes a lot less brain power.

In new research, scientists at Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, VA, set out to better understand the possible ways an animal could successfully solve a problem, beyond just the best strategy.

The work shows there are a huge number of ways an animal can accomplish a simple foraging task. It also lays out a theoretical framework for understanding these different strategies, how they relate to each other, and how they solve the same problem differently.

Some of these less-than-perfect options for accomplishing a task work nearly as well as the optimal strategy but with a lot less effort, the researchers found, freeing up animals to use precious resources to handle multiple tasks.

"As soon as you release yourself from being perfect, you would be surprised just how many ways there are to solve a problem," says Tzuhsuan Ma, a postdoc in the Hermundstad Lab who led the research.

The new framework could help researchers start examining these "good enough" strategies, including why different individuals might adapt different strategies, how these strategies might work together, and how generalizable the strategies are to other tasks. That could help explain how the brain enables behavior in the real world.

"Many of these strategies are ones we would have never dreamed up as possible ways of solving this task, but they do work well, so it's entirely possible that animals could also be using them," says Janelia Group Leader Ann Hermundstad. "They give us a new vocabulary for understanding behavior."

Looking beyond perfection
The research began three years ago when Ma started wondering about the different strategies an animal could possibly use to accomplish a simple but common task: choosing between two options where the chance of being rewarded changes over time.

The researchers were interested in examining a group of strategies that fall between optimal and completely random solutions; they were "small programs" that are resource limited but still get the job done. Each program specifies a different algorithm for guiding an animal's actions based on past observations, allowing it to serve as a model of animal behavior.

It turns out, there are a lot of such programs -- about a quarter of a million. To make sense of these strategies, the researchers first looked at a handful of the top-performing ones. Surprisingly, they found they were essentially doing the same thing as the optimal strategy, despite using fewer resources.

"We were a little disappointed," Ma says. "We spent all this time searching for these small programs, and they all follow the same computation that the field already knew how to mathematically derive without all this effort."

The researchers were motivated, however, to keep looking -- they had a strong intuition that there had to be programs out there that were good but different from the optimal strategy. Once they looked beyond the very best programs, they found what they were looking for: about 4,000 programs that fall into this "good enough" category. More importantly, more than 90% of them did something new.

They could have stopped there, but a question from a fellow researcher spurred them on: How could they figure out which strategy an animal was using?

The question prompted the team to dive deep into the behavior of individual programs and develop a systematic approach to thinking about the entire collection of strategies. They first developed a mathematical way to describe the programs' relationships to each other through a network that connected the different programs. Next, they looked at the behavior described by the strategies, devising an algorithm to reveal how one of these "good enough" programs could evolve from another.

They found that small changes to the optimal program can lead to big changes in behavior while still preserving performance. If some of these new behaviors are also useful in other tasks, it suggests that the same program could be good enough for solving a range of different problems.

"If you are thinking about an animal not being a specialist who is optimized to solve just one problem, but rather a generalist who solves many problems, this really is a new way to study that," Ma says.

Where do the results go from here?
The new work provides a framework for researchers to start thinking beyond single, optimal programs for animal behavior. Now, the team is focused on examining how generalizable the small programs are to other tasks and designing new experiments to determine which program an animal might be using to carry out a task in real time. They are also working with other researchers at Janelia to test their theoretical framework.

"Ultimately, getting a strong grasp on an animal's behavior is an essential prerequisite to understanding how the brain solves different types of problems, including some that our best artificial systems only solve inefficiently, if at all," Hermundstad says. "The key challenge is that animals might be using very different strategies than we might initially assume, and this work is helping us uncover that space of possibilities."

Source: Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Published July 2024

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