Murphy’s Law always applies when we attempt major leaps in space exploration, and the Phoenix Mars Mission is no exception. Soon after landing, the NASA lab on the Martian North Pole had trouble filtering soil into a collection area because it was clumpy. The unit was shaken in an effort to break the clumps. The shaking is believed to have caused an electrical short circuit on one of the ovens designed to analyze chemicals in the soil. New material was expected to be deposited in the Lander’s wet chemistry lab as early as today and it’s possible the oven will short circuit again. “Since there is no way to assess the probability of another short circuit occurring, we are taking the most conservative approach and treating the next sample to TEGA as possibly our last,” says Peter Smith, Phoenix’s principal investigator.
Here Peter Smith discuss the Lander’s goals in a Design News podcast.
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.
To save this item to your list of favorite Design News content so you can find it later in your Profile page, click the "Save It" button next to the item.
If you found this interesting or useful, please use the links to the services below to share it with other readers. You will need a free account with each service to share an item via that service.
Tweet This
16 
