Production delays for the Boeing Dreamliner 787 will force Boeing to conduct flight tests simultaneously for the 787 and the also-under-development 747-8, a widebody commercial airliner. The 747-8 will use the same engine and cockpit technology as the 787. The 747-8 is also delayed, but not to the same extent of the 787, which relies heavily on carbon composites for much of it structure.
There won’t be room to conduct tests for both aircraft at Boeing’s field locations in the Puget Sound. “But we’ve worked out a good plan with the Boeing Test and Evaluation team to make the most efficient use of our resources, while accommodating the test, certification and delivery schedules for both the 747-8 Freighter and the 787 Dreamliner,” says Randy Tinseth, vice president of marketing for Boeign Commercial Airplanes.
Testing for the Dreamliner will be based at Boeing Field while testing for three planes in the 747-8 program will take place at an airfield in central Washington and other remote locations. Three test 747-8 planes are in final assembly, nearing completion.
“We’ve done simultaneous flight test programs before, and we don’t see it impacting schedules,” says Tinseth. The last time major Boeing flight test programs overlapped (the 757 and 76) was in 1982.
New versions of BASF's Ecovio line are both compostable and designed for either injection molding or thermoforming. These combinations are becoming more common for the single-use bioplastics used in food service and food packaging applications, but are still not widely available.
The 100-percent solar-powered Solar Impulse plane flies on a piloted, cross-country flight this summer over the US as a prelude to the longer, round-the-world flight by its successor aircraft planned for 2015.
GE Aviation expects to chop off about 25 percent of the total 3D printing time of metallic production components for its LEAP Turbofan engine, using in-process inspection. That's pretty amazing, considering how slow additive manufacturing (AM) build times usually are.
A $1,500, hand-operated, bench-model, plastic injection machine crowdsource-funded via Kickstarter can be used to mold small, quality, plastic parts inexpensively, on demand.
The federal government is launching competitions to kickstart three more manufacturing innovation institutes, including one focused on Lightweight and Modern Metals Manufacturing Innovation.
From Dell / Intel® New Paradigms in Design Work Scott Hamilton, vertical market strategist for Dell Precision workstations, 5/2/2013 5
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A lasting memory from my first job as an engineer in an auto assembly plant is standing on hard concrete at six in the morning, vending-machine coffee clutched in hand, listening to ...
For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
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