Custom & Contract Manufacturing

What parts of the design process are the most difficult? What information are you looking for now to help you with your job? Is there a specific technology area that can be challenging to find out the latest solutions for?

If you think there’s too much hype surrounding 3D printing, perhaps that’s because you’re only thinking about plastic parts.

3D printing uses computer control to fuse layers of polymers or powders into a three-dimensional object. Rutgers University researchers found a way to add to a fourth dimension – time – to the manufacturing process.

Oxide coatings deposited in Glenn Research Center's Plasma Spray-Physical Vapor Deposition (PS-PVD) facility can be processed to be mechanically tough (erosion-resistant) and electrically conductive at room temperature. The electrically conductive phase...

In our second INSIDER story, Patti Kreh demonstrated that colleges and universities will need to take an "interdisciplinary" approach to train the design engineers of the future. "What we're seeing is the need for the blending of disciplines – a combination of traditional...

Optomec (Albuquerque, NM) unveiled its LENS machine tool machines that integrate the company's metal 3D printing technology into standard CNC machine tool platforms. Three standard system configurations are offered, making hybrid and traditional metal additive manufacturing more affordable and accessible. The three systems are...

In conventional 3D printing, a nozzle scans across a stage: depositing drops of plastic, rising slightly after each pass, and building an object in a series of layers. A new "on-the-fly" prototyping system from Cornell University allows the designer to make refinements while printing is in...

The flight software (FSW) math library is a collection of reusable math components that provides typical math utilities required by spacecraft flight software. These utilities are intended to increase flight software quality reusability and maintainability by providing a set of consistent, well-documented, and tested...

Hitoshi Goto, associate professor in Toyohashi Tech’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering, has helped develop and his lab is using original software-based tools to better understand a variety of physical, chemical, and biological phenomena at the molecular level.