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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.

Nanofibers yield stronger, tougher carbon fiber composites

By Greg Cunningham, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have developed an innovative new technique using carbon nanofibers to enhance binding in carbon fiber and other fiber-reinforced polymer composites -- an advance likely to improve structural materials for automobiles, airplanes, and other applications that require lightweight and strong materials.

The results, published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials, show promise for making products that are stronger and more affordable, opening new options for U.S. manufacturers to use carbon fiber in applications such as energy and national security.

Here, a carbon fiber is prepared for mounting in a device to test its adhesion to a polymer matrix. ORNL researchers are using polymer nanofibers to increase the adhesion, and thus the performance, of carbon fiber composites. [Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy]

"The challenge of improving adhesion between carbon fibers and the polymer matrix that surrounds them has been a concern in industry for some time, and a lot of research has gone into different approaches," said Sumit Gupta, the ORNL researcher who led the project. "What we found is that a hybrid technique using carbon nanofibers to create chemical and mechanical bonding yields excellent results."

Carbon fiber is a type of composite in which strands of pure carbon are embedded in a polymer matrix, making the resulting material stronger and lighter than steel. The challenge is that the matrix polymer does not cling strongly enough to the carbon fiber, reducing the performance of the composite material. To improve the fiber-matrix interfacial bond, industry has tried texturing the exterior of the fibers or injecting chemicals into the process -- with limited success.

The ORNL approach combines both mechanical and chemical bonding to yield a 50% improvement in tensile strength and a nearly two-fold increase in toughness, essentially the durability of the material, through use of carefully tailored nanofibers.

"We developed this process in 2023 but have been focused lately on optimizing it and fully understanding the physical processes that enable these improvements," said ORNL researcher Chris Bowland. "We found that by carefully controlling multiple variables, we can create nanofibers that greatly enhance the performance of carbon fiber composites and potentially other types of composites."

The key to the improvements is an innovative technique known as electrospinning in which a carbon fiber precursor, polyacrylonitrile, is extruded into fibers, much like a spider extrudes silk from its abdomen. The polyacrylonitrile is extruded through a strong electric field to produce strands about 200 nanometers wide, or one-hundredth the width of a typical human hair. The strands land on a spinning metal drum overwrapped with carbon fiber fabric.

By varying the strength of the electric field, the speed of the drum, and other factors, the researchers can create fibers that chemically bond to the matrix and mechanically bond to other carbon fibers, essentially creating "bridges" between the two dissimilar materials. The researchers were also able to control the types of chemical bonding and the orientation of the fibers by tweaking the electrospinning conditions.

ORNL researchers, from left, Sumit Gupta and Chris Bowland, inspect carbon fiber materials as part of their effort to improve the performance of composite materials. [Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy]

The research team has applied for a patent on the technique and plans to seek out industrial partners to license the approach in hopes of improving the competitiveness of commercial carbon fiber composites, which are already used extensively in applications such as automobiles, aerospace, and energy. They see potential for the reinforcing technique to open new applications for the use of carbon fiber, such as civil infrastructure or defense and security.

A key limiting factor to broader carbon fiber deployment is cost. By improving fiber adhesion, manufacturers can use less of the material and even use shorter carbon fibers, known as discontinuous fibers, that might otherwise have been discarded.

To ensure the new technique is as impactful and flexible as possible, the team wanted to deeply understand the forces at play at the most fundamental levels. They first turned to ORNL's Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, a DOE Office of Science user facility, and its vast array of characterization and imaging tools. These tools allowed the researchers to see what was happening at the sub-micron level. They also used techniques such as X-ray scattering and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) imaging to understand how the fibers and matrix interact. Finally, they accessed the Frontier supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, a DOE Office of Science user facility, to fully model and simulate how the fibers form and interact with the matrix.

"The characterization and computational science really required the resources of a place like ORNL," Gupta said. "By accessing expertise and capabilities from across the lab, we gained a deeper understanding of this technique, along with the ability to improve it and make it more flexible for industry to use in multiple applications."

The research team plans to continue refining the electrospinning technique to provide greater control and better results while exploring potential applications for other fiber-reinforced composites. Ongoing research is looking into integrating the new technique with prior research on developing self-sensing composites that can monitor their own health through embedded particles of semiconducting or piezoelectric materials.

Read more about this project: "Simulations reveal the secret to strengthening carbon fiber."

Published July 2025

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