A weak dollar is charging up US exports of plastics. US plastics exports grew 12.3 percent last year and rose 11.7 percent through July of this year. Imports are down 7.3 percent through July of this year. Even better news: American plastics companies invested $11.3 billion in new capital equipment. I got the new data from Bill Carteaux, the president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, a US trade group. It’s the first really positive sign for the industry in about seven years. Sales of injection molding machines had dropped about in half in that period, and may be bouncing back a little now. Even though imports from China continue to grow, America has a positive trade surplus in plastics, and that number is now growing. A plastics trade surplus of $5.9 billion through July exceeded the entire trade surplus in 2006.
A new process for laser-welding large-scale, steel-aluminum foam sandwich structures for lightweighting ships, which eliminates intermetallic phase, has been demonstrated.
A major advance in repairing composite structures combining robots and lasers bodes well for commercial aircraft such as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and Airbus A350XWB, which contain composites in large proportions of their structures.
Against a backdrop of mounting product complexity and a need to keep a lid on development costs, companies are recognizing a need to make simulation a more integral part of the design process. In response, vendors in the CAD world are building out CAE functionality as part of their CAD suites while simulation vendors are building tighter integrations to leading CAD tools. Keith Meintjes, Ph.D., Practice Manager, Simulation and Analysis at CIMdata, Inc., joins Design News CAD Editor Beth Stackpole in this radio program to explore the new face of integrated CAD and CAE, how companies are benefitting from this tighter partnership between platforms, and how integrating CAE earlier in the development cycle pays off in optimized product designs.
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