A North American manufacturer will be one of the show stoppers at next month’s Fakuma injection molding fair in Friedrichshafen, Germany. Trexel of Woburn, MA, will show how long-fiber reinforced plastics can be used in its microcellular foam process called MuCell. The MuCell process produces lower cost engineering parts with high quality and exceptional dimensional stability in applications where foaming has not historically been deployed. The long fiber technology from Ticona works well for large and complex parts. New parts use an advanced screw design developed jointly by Trexel and Ticona. Hartmut Traut, business director - Europe of Trexel, said several benefits result. “These include potential weight savings of 10 percent, and a 10 to 20 percent cycle time reduction. In addition, customers can get these benefits along with reduced warpage compared to solid injection molding and prior iterations of the MuCell process,” says Traut. One advanced American user of MuCell is fastener maker Soutcho, which uses injection molding machines sized from 55 to 350 tons in clamping force to make MuCell parts.
Ford and Unifi, maker of Repreve, will gather and recycle 2 million plastic bottles at CES and other shows for conversion into the Repreve seat fabric used in the 2012 Focus EV.
Thanks to embedded electronics, medical devices are getting smaller and smarter than ever. Pacemakers and implantable defibrillators are now able to call physicians. MRIs, CT scanners, and ultrasound machines are gaining mobility. And the venerable Band-Aid may soon be able to detect illnesses ranging from fevers to heart arrhythmias. On February 21, join Design News senior editor Charles Murray for a wide-ranging discussion, "Embedded Angles for Medical Products," which will explore the latest developments in medical electronics. The discussion will examine advances in medical device technology and offer an inside look at the embedded electronics behind it.
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