Nylon producers are looking for their next Holy Grail. Most of the world’s global nylon goes into fiber, where polyester is gaining favor. Also weak is the auto market, a major outlet for engineering grades of nylon. Pundits say operating rates for nylon output could be as low as 80 percent for the next four years. Development of injection moldable nylon air intake manifolds gave nylon an enormous boost in the 1990s-to say nothing of the benefit in auto design. In 1960, the average car used just 0.4 pound of nylon. Most applications were noncritical, such as valve stems or bushings. By 2000, the average car used 11 pounds of nylon.
GM’s 3800 Series II V-6 engine in 1995 featured the first thermoplastic oil pan gasket with an integrated windage tray molded of nylon 66. In 2008, Daimler introduced the first production oil pan module made from nylon. Both DuPont and BASF have developed special optimized grades that could boost use of nylon for oil pans. The big issue was punishment from flying highway stones. New U.S. fuel guidelines may be just the impetus needed to get the momentum really moving for nylon. In the today’s stimulus parlance, this technology is shovel ready.
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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