Machine Design Blogs

It’s day two or is it day three here at the MD&M show in Anaheim Calif. — jet lag and all the excitement has made me lose all sense of day and time!

There is some pretty amazing and cool new technology on display. Here are just a few examples that caught my eye:

– Machines from Everite Machine Products in Philadelphia grind and cut difficult materials regardless of their hardness or strength. The machines use an entirely different kind of machining process called electrochemical grinding (ECG). In ECG, the anode is the workpiece and the cathode is the conductive grinding wheel. A continuous stream of electrolyte flows at the interface of the grinding wheel and workpiece and passes the current in the circuit. Since ECG does not rely solely on an abrasive process, the results are precise cuts free of heat, stress, burrs, and mechanical distortions. Good applications include grinding the hole in needles and trocars. Under an electron microscope, it can be seen that abrasive grinding and grit blast deburring does not remove burrs, but rolls them to the inside. ECG, in contrast, shows a perfectly smooth edge.

– Metrigraphics in Wilmington, Mass. makes microcircuitry in which high-resolution photolithography, thin-film coating, and microminiature 2D and 3D precision electroforming combine for a high density, multilayer flexible circuit with 5-micron traces and spaces. The circuits can be placed in implantable devices for diagnostic imaging, monitoring, and drug administration.

– Silicon formulations from Saint-Gobain’s plastic division allow what is called two-shot molding. Basically, plastic and silicone components can be molded together in one operation.

– PCB mount pressure sensors from Kavlico Corp. in Morpark, Calif., uses piezo-resistive sensing that lets designers select a standard voltage output device, or alternative digital SPI output. Selecting digital output lets designers eliminate components due to the embedded 10-bit analog-to-digital converter. This saves space, component costs, and reduces power consumption.

– CMP Global in Barbados, BB, performs what is called pressure diecasting. This injects molten metal into a steel mold under pressure to form a near net shape product. It is a cost-effective way to produce metal parts for large volume production.

– New packaging machines from RapidPak in Lodi, Wisconsin, do not use air bladders to seal products like traditional machines. Rather, they use a patent-pending method in which servos apply the sealing pressure. This provides a closed loop system because the torques from the servos can be used as process parameters: A too-high torque, for example, lets the system know there is something wrong.

– A process called rotational molding produces spherical shapes with one piece construction — there are no bonded seams to come apart. Albert International in Gainsville, Georgia makes things like blood pressure bulbs, in-line pumps, and syringes with this process.

– Rogan Corp. in Northbrook, Illinois overmolds liquid silicone rubber directly to plastic and metal parts. This works well in applications such as waterproofing complex geometries and electronic interconnects.

The Anaheim Convention Center is not too bad looking, and seeing some sunshine is great. But California is unseasonably cool like most of the rest of the country.

The Medical Design & Manufacturing show is being held again in Anaheim California. Last year, I blogged about the artistic creations of James Kim, applications engineer at a company then called Charmilles. It has since merged with Agie to form AgieCharmilles. In addition to electrical discharge machinery, the company now provides high-end, multi-axis machine tools for high-speed machining.

James has been at work again with his beautiful creations. The sculpture of the arms twisted together (left, lower corner) signify the marriage of Agie and Charmilles: The new company can CNC and EDM parts (electrically conductive materials cannot be EDMd). And the twisted “Charmilles” sculpture (right, upper corner) is one James did last year. He ran it with what is called Charmilles’ “turn-while-burn” EDM capabilities, in which the B-axis of the EDM machine is rotating while the wire is cutting in the X, Y, and Z axes. He says a collegue of his wrote the program to cut the sculpture of the head (center, below) on a 5-axis Mikron high-speed milling machine. The machine cut the head in the X, Y, and Z axes, as well as rotationally in the B and C axes.

How much economic stimulus do you think tax cuts will bring? Not much, according to

the U.S. Business and Industry Council.

Their argument is that so much manufacturing has gone overseas that it is almost impossible to spend money on something produced domestically. So any tax rebate to consumers will go toward increasing the trade deficit, not the result politicians had in mind.

The Private Sector: Too many imports could spoil stimulus plan



Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Alan Tonelson and Sarah Linden

Before Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke decides on the next interest rate cut to stimulate the economy and head off a recession, he really needs to listen to … Ben Bernanke.

So do the Congress and the president, who have concocted a stimulus plan of their own. In recent testimony on Capitol Hill, Mr. Bernanke unwittingly made clear that the conditions needed to turn lower borrowing costs and tax rebate checks into actual growth are largely gone. The reason: Goods from abroad so thoroughly dominate the purchases of U.S. households and businesses that encouraging much more American spending no longer encourages much more American production.

Alan Tonelson is a Research Fellow at the U.S. Business and Industry Council, a national business organization comprised mainly of family-owned domestic manufacturers. He is the author of The Race to the Bottom and a contributor to the Council’s AmericanEconomicAlert.org Web site. Sarah Linden is a Media Relations Associate at the Council.

As Mr. Bernanke told legislators who wondered if it matters where stimulus money is spent, “Well, you’d hope that they would spend it on things that are domestically produced so that the spending power doesn’t go elsewhere.”

What Mr. Bernanke meant was that buying products (or services) made in the United States creates the biggest and quickest domestic growth bang per stimulus buck because it encourages companies to ramp up output and possibly build new facilities and hire more workers. These moves in turn would create new business for supplier firms and put more money in employees’ pockets — creating still more productive opportunities and indeed a virtuous growth cycle.

American spending on imports would increase U.S. growth as well — by stimulating the wholesale and retail and transportation and warehousing sectors. Higher profits and stock prices in these sectors would help, too, by enriching American investors. But the domestic growth boost would be more modest — especially if companies, as is increasingly the case, invest many of the profits overseas. And these effects won’t materialize nearly as quickly as most economists and politicians insist is needed to prevent a slump.

Unfortunately, this smaller stimulus bounce is inevitable — and resulting growth will fall well short of politicians’ and voters’ expectations — because import levels have grown so high for so many types of manufactured products.

Consumer goods are the types of purchases likeliest to be made with rebate or other stimulus dollars that are spent (as opposed to saved). Yet in 2006 — the last year for which detailed data exists — more than 61 cents out of every dollar Americans spent on such goods was spent on imports. In 1997, that figure was about 38 cents.

In many major consumer goods categories, moreover, the rates of import penetration are much higher. For example, in 2006, nearly 96 percent of the men’s dress and sport shirts sold in the United States were imports. More than 90 percent of the non-athletic shoes came from overseas, along with nearly 90 percent of the women’s coats, and more than 86 percent of the women’s blouses.

Moreover, this trend shows no signs of stopping for two reasons. First, these surging import levels have simply overwhelmed the remaining U.S.-based producers of these goods, meaning that domestic alternatives simply no longer exist in many cases. Second, even in industries where import penetration is much lower in absolute terms, rapid growth means that the days of many competitive domestic producers are numbered.

Import penetration is less advanced in many capital goods industries — the products that companies buy to build, equip, upgrade and expand factories and other facilities. But the levels are still high enough to undermine the domestic growth benefits of business tax breaks.

Government data indicate that, in 2006, nearly 34 cents out of every dollar spent by businesses on plant and equipment was spent on imports. In 1997, this figure was just over 21 cents. As in consumer goods, however, import penetration is much higher in many critical capital goods sectors — which just happen to create the economy’s best-paying jobs on average, lead the nation in productivity and generate most of America’s productivity growth.

In 2006, for example, nearly 81 cents of every dollar U.S.-based businesses spent on machine tools purchased imports. For construction equipment, the figure was nearly 50 cents; for power generation turbines, 56 cents; and for semiconductors that archetypical industry of the future, more than 47 percent of the chips used in America in 2006 came from overseas — up slightly from 44 percent in 1997.

Why has the import tide grown large enough to sandbag Washington’s best-laid stimulus plans? Failed trade policies deserve much of the blame. Starting with the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, too many recent U.S. trade deals have focused too tightly on helping multinational companies move jobs and production offshore, instead of opening foreign markets to U.S. made goods.

Second, Washington has failed miserably to fight foreign predatory trade practices like currency manipulation and subsidization and dumping that hurt competitive domestic producers and their employees for reasons having nothing to do with free markets or free trade.

Yet these trade-related problems won’t be fixed unless voters demand change much more effectively. And recapitalizing domestic industry to pursue the new opportunities created will take even longer.

Therefore, Americans for now may have no choice but to accept that many of the stimulus plans’ benefits will leak overseas, and that near-term economic performance will be modest at very best. But it’s not too early to insist that U.S. leaders start recreating the foundations for solid, healthy growth — and stop making policy as if the global economy and the trade-related mess they created didn’t exist.

Badly designed products are bad enough. But what might be worse — annoying or senseless designs. They add on layers of unecessry complexity, making it exceedingly difficult for us poor slobs trying to use the things. Case in point is a new kind of torque screw. No argument that torque screws in general make a lot of sense — once you tighten a screw down, it won’t easily vibrate off. But what genius had to put an additional post in the center of the screw head? Now all your old wrenches don’t work so you have to go buy a whole new set. Or, take you car to an expensive mechanic.

Another design that peeves me: the seatbelt warning on my 2007 Toyata Matrix. Don’t get me wrong — in general, I love the little car. It is cute and gets me where I want to go without gulping gas by the gallon. But the beeper that warns you forgot to put on your seatbelt drives me NUTS. It is a high, piercing wail that goes on seeminly forever. I’ve taken to letting my little dog ride in the passengar seat, and we often zip along uneventfully for miles, when suddenly off goes the &*^%$%$% alarm. Even the weight of a 15 lb dog sets it off! I can’t wait to figure out how to kill that darn alarm.

Do you have any pet design peeves? If so, send them in and I might feature them here.

A few other things gleaned from SolidWorks 2008:

– One conference theme was that of teaching kids engineering through robotics. Robotic contests mentioned included ROBOCON, FIRST, and ROBO Cup. Kids can use 3D ContentCentral, a free service on the SolidWorks Web site for locating, configuring, downloading, and requesting 3D parts and assemblies, 2D blocks, library features, and macros.

– Tulane University has closed it Mechanical Engineering Department.

– Check out Gliffy, a nifty drawing program that works on a hosted Web site.

SolidWorks CEO Jeff Ray says it would be good to apply Creative Commons to product design. CC defines everything between full copyright — all rights reserved — and the public domain — no rights reserved.

Today, CAD is all about design intent, not just geometry. Scott Harris, co-founder of SolidWorks says there are now new surfacing mathematics that are better than NURBS. There is said to be a new kernel in the works for CATIA. Basically, a kernel is software code that solves topology.

A last view from my hotel window shows why Ione might be tempted to move to San Diego!

Day Four, Live from SolidWorks World 2008

Don Norman spoke today on how to tie engineering and emotional design. He showed us an images of salt and pepper shakers as an example of bad design. They were burnished stainless steel. One shaker had a hole in the top, and the other shaker had five holes in the top. Norman asked the audience, “Which one is the salt shaker and which the pepper?” Answers were about 50/50 for both. His point: Each side had its good reasons why it picked one over the other. But in the final analysis, it doesn’t matter what you think, but rather what the person that filled the things thinks!

Which is for salt and which for pepper?

So his rules to design by are:

1. Think about people. Put people in the designs that are part of the model so you can analyze things such as reach, limits, canter of balance to see if people can actually use the objects you design.

2. Make it usable. Examples of bad design come from common machine tools in machine shops. People have to be contortionists just to run the machines.

3. No signs. A product that needs signs on it is badly designed. People don’t read signs anyway.

4. Make it beautiful. Make even things like forklifts beautiful. In a lot of ways, when it comes to design, LOOKS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN REALITY.

View from my hotel room…..

The folks at Avweb produced an interesting video about the break up of an F-15 during a training flight. The explanation of what went wrong and the problem is quite illuminating.

(http://www.avweb.com/eletter/archives/avflash/1037-full.html#196998)

Day Three, live from SolidWorks World 2008:

Announced today at the opening session of the SolidWorks 2008 show was a new program called 3Dvia Composer — formerly Seemage — that Dassault recently purchased. It is a Web-based product that works with SolidWorks to deliver 3D content for non-engineering personnel such as marketing and sales.

A few customers highlighted in today’s presentation include medical companies such as Still River Systems Inc, which makes proton therapy systems (used instead of the more-intrusive X-ray systems). The systems use particle-beam accelerators to fire electron in a precise manner towards tumors. Another one is Taga Innovations in Israel which designed a device called the “Rewalk.” Quadriplegics can strap one on and walk for the first time in their lives.

Danny Forster from the Discovery Channel’s Big it Builder show spoke on how as an architect he designs in nothing but 3D. One recent project was the Glenville Stadium in Arizona which has a retractable football field. This makes it easier to grow fresh grass on the field, as well as allows it to be used for activities other than football. In the past, stadiums were designed as a structure with the design then wrapped around it like wallpaper. It was decided that this building should look like a snake coiled on itself because of its desert surroundings and because the snake is the Patriots logo. So, the stadium was engineered as a hyperbolic curve bent in on itself.

But of all the presentations, the one that truly blew my mind was one from a kind of mad genius named Theo Jansen. He engineers “creatures” that live on the beach — what he called “new forms of life not made of protein.” The creatures’ protein is cable conduit, while their “muscles” are conduit that pumps air into a soda bottle for reuse. “Nerve cells” made from inverters trigger the muscles. Three inverters make a dynamic system or a computer that is the beginnings of the brains of the animal. The creatures get their energy from the wind and do not have to compete for food. Jansen’s vision is that they will eventually live on herds on the beach.

Check out this video of the incredible creatures.

A creature taking a nap

Day Two: Jeff Ray, CEO of SolidWorks, says the show has so far drawn 4,400 attendees. In the future, he wants to see more sharing between DS technologies and SolidWorks. He says software developers cannot afford to “fall in love with their own technologies.” Companies should never think that they own customers. Nobody does. Customers can pick whatever they want whenever they want. Ray also says Latin America is SolidWorks’ fastest region of growth, even faster than China.

Also speaking was an electrical systems teacher at Long Beach Community College who has his pre-engineering students design submersible robots in SolidWorks and enter them in robotic competitions. He thinks that human-intensive manufacturing is rapidly disappearing, but we should not be all doom and gloom — there are plenty of rich opportunities in automation. People are needed to design, build, and install robots, as well as maintain them, for example. He says a recent graduate who knows more than just one thing, say, mechanical, electrical, hydraulics, and pneumatics, have their pick of high-paying jobs.

Ex-CEO and one of the founders of SolidWorks, Jon Hirschtik gave an interesting look CAD’s 50-year history. It all started in 1963 with Ivan Sutherland who wrote his M.I.T. thesis on “SketchPad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System.” Back then, he even discussed the idea of doing structural analysis in CAD and applying constraints to models — unheard of at the time. Hirschtik says the 1070’s brought 3D modeling research at Cambridge University. Research in using B-reps as the basis of CAD was underway. And Alan Grayer and Charles Lang helped write the ACIS and Parasolid kernels. The name “ACIS” came from its developers’ initials: Alan Charles Ivan System. The 1970’s also brought some of the first commercial applications such as Computer Vision, Cadam, and Applicon, and a Unigraphics CAD-CAM system called “The Total Solution.” By the 1980’s, second-generation CAD was coming along with CATIA in 1981, AutoCAD in 1983, and Pro/Engineer in 1987. SolidWorks was developed in 1993, and since that time, there have been 16 major releases.

Hirschtik also discussed what he thinks are the big trends in the future of CAD:

Hosted computing — Applications run on Web sites, not on PCs. Only the Web browser runs locally. This is already being done extensively in other areas (e-mail, online banking, and Google Docs).

Open source — The source code is open for anyone to change. If they do change it, they must implement the changes in the original code. Current examples include Linux, Apache, MySQL, OpenOffice, Firefox, and Apache.

Video game technology — Graphics quality, 3D user interfaces, and physical simulations are all things that CAD will exploit more and more in the future.



Touch Interfaces — Already big with the iPhone, Wii, and 3-axis mouse.

3D printing — Can only get bigger in the future.