Materials & Coatings

The rush to increase vehicle content of lightweight materials is demanding increasingly sophisticated techniques for joining non-traditional materials in non-traditional applications. The use of adhesives in body-in-white assembly is increasing at a feverish pace, and...

Our most recent issue of Tech Briefs featured a roundtable discussion about the future of 3D printing. The industry pros, including Stratsys Direct Manufacturing CEO Kent Firestone, spoke about how metal additive manufacturing has yet to catch on, due to cost constraints and build limitations....

Seals are the workhorses of hydraulic systems, and the demands placed on seals can be extreme in today’s increasingly rugged industrial applications. Challenges such as higher temperatures, fluctuating pressures, aggressive media, difficult terrain, longer working hours,...

A team at Georgia Tech has discovered a Velcro-like way of mass-producing gecko-inspired adhesives. Principal investigator Prof. Michael Varenberg believes his team’s technology can someday be used on pick-and-place industrial machines, wall-scaling cleaners, and even small repair robots that travel...

Engineers at the University of California San Diego have found a new way to make soft, flexible, 3D-printed robots. The “flexoskeletons” are both made of a rigid material and a thin sheet of polycarbonate that acts as a flexible base. Watch the demo on Tech Briefs TV.

What do you think? Will...

Structural adhesives are the answer to many challenging transportation challenges. Need to improve a vehicle's durability? Crashworthiness? Make it lighter? Enable more design flexibility? Enhance stiffness for better handling? Accommodate many different types of materials? Check, check, and...