As a follow on to the last post, I have been investigating the cost of manufacturing equipment.  The classic machine tool is the most widely used piece of equipment for fabricating just about anything made out of metal.  The machine tool has been quietly undergoing it’s own revolution since it’s inception in the 1950’s. The […]

2011 was a difficult year for many sectors of the US economy.  World markets were about the same as at home.  The general weakness was felt world wide with currencies, especially the dollar and the Euro, declining due to bank failures in EU, financial crises in Greece and Italy, unrest in the Middle east creating […]

Kurt Manufacturing will introduce and demonstrate the capabilities of the new Engineered Systems Division at IMTS ’08. Operating continuously during the show, Kurt will show a fully integrated automated indexing system of a robot, multi-station workholding, indexer and gage with process control. The Kurt Engineered Systems offering is the result of the formation of a […]

Siemens PLM Software announced a new integrated machine design solution aimed at creating value for companies that develop and market machine tools and production machines. Mechatronics Concept Designer™ represents a paradigm shift for the industry with a new systems engineering approach to machine design that captures “voice of the user ” input, manages early requirements […]

Gear boxes are a complex subject in their own right.  The equations of motion required to generate gear teeth are pretty complicated.  And the issues associated with gear box reliability are even more complicated.  The parameters of merit are precision and load capability.  But cost is always a factor, and ultimately every system’s performance must […]

The industrial revolution was a period of unprecedented expansion of technology that lead to a huge increase in economic opportunity.  It was a period marked with great inventiveness that transformed the Europe and America.  The power of that inventiveness echoes through today. Similarly, in recent years, there have been a number of significant breakthroughs that […]

There has been a thread going through my mind involving the general field of machinery.   The design of specialty machinery requires a great many disciplines, truly a mechatronic endeavor. Over the years, machine tool makers constantly worked on making the machines more complex in order to serve the market with greater functionality.   In fact […]

Traditional piecemeal compensation of one axis at a time does not consider axis kinematic relationships and their effect on volumetric accuracy, an ability needed to meet today’s higher cutting accuracy requirements. The multi-axis methodology of volumetric error compensation (VEC) originated in Boeing R&D, St. Louis MO, and uses laser technology from Automated Precision, Inc. (API), […]

Services and products from hydraulics, pneumatics, electrics, and linear technology were linked by Rexroth engineers to produce a custom engineering concept for Swiss company Mikron Machining Technology. “The fact that Rexroth offers coordinated components from pneumatic, hydraulic and electric drive technology right through to high speed control enabled us to select the most suitable characteristics […]

Leadership in Engineering This is the 3rd annual Leadership event announcing the winners in the 2009 Leadership Awards Program. The Design World User Community have cast their votes and we are pleased to announce the winners. ADVANCED MATERIALS Da/Pro Rubber is a custom manufacturer of precision rubber, TPE, and plastic molding products. The proprietary Da/Pro […]

The future of the US economy, and our future as an industrial power will be the result of our cumulative creativity.  New industries will be the result of new ideas, new technologies, new thinking.  It’s gratifying to see programs like the First Robotic Competition getting 215,000 junior high school and high school students exposed to […]

Atlanta, GA – Factory Automation Systems (FAS) has announced the addition of Ron Potter as Director of Robotic Technologies. Mr. Potter has over 40 years experience in the robotics industry and has been involved in the development and implementation of 2000+ robotics applications.  Mr. Potter will be responsible for further developing growth of the robotic […]

Linear motion is particularly impacted by the choice of feedback.  And for most systems the use of feedback is not an option.  Linear motors, for example, cannot be operated without a feedback device.  And because of the linear motor’s roots in semiconductor manufacturing, the feedback is usually a high resolution linear tape scale. How much […]

September U.S. manufacturing technology consumption totaled $439.51 million, according to AMTDA, the American Machine Tool Distributors’ Association, and AMT – The Association For Manufacturing Technology. This total, as reported by companies participating in the USMTC program, was up 32.0% from August but down 1.4% from the total of $445.56 million reported for September 2007. With […]

The cost of most forms of energy is on the rise. Consequently, more attention is focused on how much energy a component, device, product, or equipment consumes. Here are suggestions to help keep that consumption low. By Leslie Langnau Managing Editor – Design World Consumer appliances have it. European machine tools have it. And if […]

The Computer Numerical Controls (CNC) market has simply exploded in the last two years lead by the surge in production of machine tools in the European and Asian markets. The worldwide market for CNC systems is expected to grow at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.8 percent over the next five years. The […]

Here’s a closer look at software development for programming motion systems and how these choices affect software reusability. By Chuck Lewin Performance Motion Devices Software development can be the single greatest engineering cost for many machine design projects. This observation is especially true for motion control projects because of the inherent complexity of managing such […]

It seems as if one of the “new” buzzwords in the industrial controls arena is mechatronics. What was for years, motion control, was reinvented as mechatronics for a variety of reasons. In part, the motion control term didn’t communicate the mechanical nature of the problem. And that is a very important distinction to consider. Good […]

Why should you care? Because whatever the term “mechatronics” might mean to you, it affects so many aspects of our daily life. We’ve all seen commercials with a production floor full of welding robots making automobiles. Certainly automotive manufacturing would not be possible without numerically controlled machine tools, robots and much more. And the automotive […]

Here’s a quick look at your options when selecting drives for use in machine tools. In machine tools, typically the details of the installed drive technology are concealed. In principle, however, there are several possibilities for main, feed and auxiliary drives to carry out the needed machine movements. Main Drives Main drives are predominantly closed-loop […]