I have been writing about engineering plastics for more than 20 years, and I never had heard about any relationship between crystallinity and shish-kebabs. That is, until I saw the May 18 issue of Science magazine. It contains an article indicating that polyolefins crystallize into shish-kebab shapes (I couldn’t make this stuff up).More importantly, the researchers who wrote the article say they know how to manipulate the shape of these “shish-kebabs” so that the polymer structure becomes much stronger. "Our discovery is pertinent to the relatively strong and stiff plastics," says Julia Kornfield, chemical engineering professor at Caltech. "For example, it will allow manufacturers to make polymers for complex and beautifully shaped body panels with equal or better quality than currently available—and cheaper and faster." The lead author of the paper is Shuichi Kimata, a former postdoctoral researcher in Kornfield's Caltech lab. He linked Kornfield's group at Caltech with Yoshinobu Nozue's group at Sumitomo and collaborators at the University of Tokyo. The title of the Science paper is "Molecular Basis of the Shish-Kebab Morphology in Polymer Crystallization." What’s the path to commercialization? What’s the timetable? Or is this just an academic tease? Stay tuned.
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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