Design engineers are fuming mad about the lack of decent options for cadmium as a plating material. A couple made comments in a recent study conducted by the Reed Business Information Research Department for Design News. “We need an environmentally friendly replacement with decent cost and performance,” says an engineer who designs equipment for in house use. ”These days, cadmium is effectively banned for environmental reasons, but none of the possible replacements meet all the performance requirements.” Cadmium has been widely used as a plating material because it offers good corrosion resistance, cathodic protection of steel, galvanic compatibility with aluminum, as well as excellent lubricity. Cadmium can be dyed to many colors and can be used as a final finish or a paint base. Inhalation of cadmium-containing fumes can result in chemical pneumonitis, pulmonary edema, and death. Human exposures to environmental cadmium are primarily the result of the burning of fossil fuels and municipal wastes It’s one of six substances banned by the European Union’s Restriction on Hazardous Substances (RoHS) directive.
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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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