Coca-Cola sold at the upcoming Winter Olympics in Vancouver, BC, will feature bottles that are composed 30 percent of sugar-based feedstocks. The new “plantbottles” began to appear on store shelves in Europe last November, and no one should be able to tell the difference in the new bottle. Coke officials say they have the same chemistry and the same feel as bottles made entirely from polyethylene terepthalate (PET).The bottle is not biodegradable, and it represents the new goal of many sustainable plastics applications-reduced carbon footprint. A third-party company hired by Coke affirms that the new bottle reduces the carbon footprint by 12 to 19 percent compared to a bottle made entirely of petroleum feedstocks.
The plant bottle feedstock comes from sugar cane in Brazil that is crushed to produce juice, which is then fermented and distilled. Ethanol produced from that process then goes through a series of chemical processes and is converted to a monoethylene glycol. That’s the same chemical usually derived from petroleum to produce PET for use in plastic bottles. The sugar-derived glycol is subsequently mixed with terephthalic acid to create plastic. Dow Plastics also will use Brazilian sugar cane as a plastics-making feedstock.
Coke wants to produce a bottle completely made of the sugar-based plastic that remains totally recyclable. For now, the goal is to produce two billion plant bottles by the end of this year. Another goal is to use a non food feedstock in the future.
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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