The best hope for new bioplastics is to find niche applications where they fill a technical need. One great new example comes out of Cornell University, where research set up a company called Novomer to develop plastics made from carbon dioxide and cirtus fruits. Aliphatic polycarbonates (APCs) made from the process are biodegradable, biocompatible, are optically clear and provide high oxygen and water barrier. They’re also quite pricey – say $50 a pound an up.
Novomer today announced its first commercial product — NB-180, a poly(propylene carbonate) (PPC) sacrificial binder that burns cleaner, more uniformly and at lower temperatures than currently available products. Sacrificial binders provide mechanical strength to ensure uniform consistency, solidification or adhesion during manufacturing processes. Application areas are extremely broad and include advanced ceramics, microelectronics, nanotechnology, metal brazing and fuel cells. It’s aimed at assembly of micro- and nano-scale devices.
Fox Holt, product manager for Novomer says there are no plans yet to use the material as a sacrificial binder in powder injection molding – a mass market where it could really achieve some volume.
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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