The nylon business may be weak right now, but the smart money says it has a bright future. Last week, I reported from the National Plastics Exposition that Invista, a major chemical producer, is entering the engineering nylon business. Now, there’s another new name in the business- Ascend Performance Materials. That’s what the nylon business formerly owned by St. Louis-based Solutia will be called. SK Capital Partners of New York recently completed the purchase of the nylon assets from Solutia. The business lost money on $1.8 billion in sales last year. Frederic Poses, former CEO of American Standard and COO of AlliedSignal, will head the new company. Timothy Strehl continues as president. “We are attracted by the growth opportunities that exist within Ascend’s businesses, which have solid fundamentals, a strong customer base and talented people. Ascend, as an independent private company, will be focused on leveraging our leading technology to develop new and innovative products for our global customer base,” said Poses in an announcement.
Ascend overnight becomes the second largest nylon producer in North America. DuPont is first. The deal included plants in Alvin, TX; Decatur, AL; Greenwood, SC; Pensacola, FL; and Foley, AL.
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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