Minneapolis—Attaching sports banners to the Metrodome's wall once kept the stadium's engineers on the run.
As staff engineer Jeff Freeman explains, the Metrodome plays host to three different teams, and each has its own set of banners that ring the stadium. At roughly eight-feet high, the banners cover wall sections from 15 to 52 feet long and weigh up to 15 lb.
In the past, drywall screws left walls with more holes in them than the San Diego Chargers' defensive line. It also took too long to change banners.
Freeman finally tackled the banner problem with 3,300 ft of Dual-Lock fasteners from 3M (St. Paul, MN). These reclosable fastners employ hundreds of mushroom-shaped stems that interlock for a pull-apart (tensile) strength of roughly 40 lb/in 2 . Freeman mounts the one half of adhesive-backed Dual Lock on 2-inch-wide×3/16-inch-thick strips of aluminum, which have been permantently screwed into the wall. The other goes on the backs of the banners, making installation as simple as pressing the banner against the strips. And removing the banner has become as easy as quick tug. Now all Freeman has to worry about are souvenir hunters.
For 3D printing to make the jump from rapid prototyping to manufacturing, engineers will need to find easier ways to move products from their CAD screens to their printers.
Gigabit and PoE are two networking technologies moving ahead in tandem as industrial users power remote Ethernet devices such as IP security cameras at 1,000 Mbps over existing CAT5 cable.
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.
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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I've been using workstations for more than 10 years and love finding ways to get more performance from my system. With demanding professional applications that require more power each ...
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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