The giant Solvay Group, based in Brussels, is making a major bet on the plastics electronics business. Most recently, Solvay North America Investments led a $20.6 million financing round in which it bought a minority interest in Plextronics, a Pittsburgh-based company that has new conductive plastics technology. Plextronics envisions 15 billion printed electronic devices by 2015, using new technology developed by a Carnegie-Mellon professor that is capable of commercial scale performance. That’s where Solvay may become particularly interesting. Right now, Plextronics has no polymer manufacturing capability. Solvay has plenty, particularly in very high performance plastics. It’s too early to say now if Solvay may help in actual polymer production.
One of the goals is to produce flexible solar cells that could significantly reduce the cost to produce power from solar cells. Another potential market is printed Organic Light Emitting Diodes displays that could challenge plasma technology and liquid crystal displays. Another possible application is RFID tags.
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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