This past June Design News co-sponsored the International Plastics Design Competition held at the National Plastics Exposition in Chicago. One entry stood in stark contrast to the tractor hoods and water-ski bodies usually on display at previous plastic design contests held by the Society of Plastics Industry.
It clearly showed that polymers have entered a brave new world. Membrane Technologies B.V. of the Netherlands showed a hollow fiber membrane, which had been cast with a new sulfonated copolymer from Kraton. Varying sulfonation levels allow ion exchange capacity of 0.4 to 2.0 milli-equivalent per gram. The ion selectivity and unique polymer architecture results in efficient salt rejection. The fibers can be used in a larger water purification or desalinization plant.
The technical complexity of the entry must have baffled the judges, who didn’t even award it some kind of honorable mention among the bevy of announced awards.
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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