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If your idea of "smart fabrics" is a pair of khaki pants that sheds food stains, think again. The smartest fabrics are becoming electro-active, allowing them to address far more […]

If you've struggled to take weight out of your designs without sacrificing strength, you could likely learn a thing or two from the engineers who created the world's biggest commercial […]

THE VERY IDEA OF DESIGNING "GREEN" PRODUCTS may be the kind of thing that keeps you up at night. After all, you might have to reconsider all your time-tested design […]

ENGINEERS WITH PROBLEMS TO SOLVE RIGHT NOW MIGHT NOT GIVE A SECOND thought to nanotechnology since so much of it still seems more like science fiction than fact. But nanotech […]

HURRY UP AND WAIT. IT'S A FITTING MOTTO FOR CUSTOM-PART MANUFACTURING. Though you may be in a hurry to bring your product to market, you will have to wait for […]

UNRAVEL ALL THE WIRING FROM A TYPICAL LUXURY CAR, AND IT WOULD STRETCH more than a mile and half. Just about every inch of that wire would be covered with […]

If you fire up the Formula race car that Raser Technologies recently built, don't expect to hear the roar of the engine. Because there isn't one. Raser's racer instead runs […]

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM, AT LEAST THE KIND THAT OPERATES IN MANY PURCHASING departments, has it that moving manufacturing operations to cheaper labor markets will invariably lower the total cost of making […]

IF YOU THINK THAT CARBON-FIBER COMPOSITES BELONG ONLY IN THE AIR AND ON racetracks, think again. The 34th annual Society of Plastics Engineers' Innovation Awards, which honor the year's best […]

NASA'S PLANS TO SEND ASTRONAUTS BACK TO THE Moon and, ultimately, to Mars raises an important sartorial question: What ever will they wear? The zero-gravity spacesuits that astronauts currently don […]

ENGINEERING PLASTICS AND BOAT engines already go together like ducks and water. With their corrosion resistance and ever-improving structural capabilities, plastics have taken the place of metal in components both […]

High-temperature superconductors (HTS) sure sound like a good idea. When fashioned into wires and cooled to about 77K, which passes for balmy in superconductivity circles, these ceramic materials can carry […]

ANYONE WHO DOES THEIR COMPUTING ON THE GO RECOGNIZES first-hand the trade-off between size and performance. Notebook computers can perform much like a desktop machine, but even the tiniest ones […]

BRETT Blaisdell PLASTICS ENGINEER Kodak Kodak's latest single-use cameras may be almost as pretty as the photos they take. Intended as a premium product that will appeal to consumers around […]

Picking the right plastic for a new product really is like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. There are at least 50,000 grades of commercial plastics on the […]

MOST PEOPLE ENJOY CLEAN AIR, BUT IT CAN GIVE HEAVY-TRUCK ENGINEERS A REAL HEADACHE now that truck builders have to comply with Environmental Protection Agency regulations that require them to […]

DO CAR WINDOWS HAVE TO BE MADE FROM GLASS? THE AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY HAS always answered "yes." But you may soon find yourself gazing through a very different kind of glazing. […]

FOR ENGINEERS INTERESTED IN FUNCTIONAL prototypes of plastic parts, the models produced on 3D printing machines may not have much to offer at first glance. These rapid prototyping machines create […]

The Tablet PC, a new class of pen-based mobile computers, brings an old fable to mind. With the birds and animals poised for a battle, both sides ask the bat […]

Ugly just doesn't sell anymore. Need proof? Just take a walk through any of today's big-box retailers, where even the most mundane household products have gotten a dash of style. […]

When cordless drills first turned up on job sites about a decade ago, construction workers had a graphic way of showing their skepticism about the power of unplugged tools. They […]

Ever watch someone try to squeeze a full-size pickup truck into a parking space down at the local mini-mall? "The more sizeable trucks often take two or three tries to […]

Even a glimpse at John Deere's tractors and combines will quickly drive away any doubt about the growing use of plastics in agricultural equipment. Over the past decade, the company […]

So you need a plastic gear set. Just crack open a catalog or design handbook. With a little basic information about center distances, pitch and pressure angles in hand, you […]

Engineers in the U.S. and Germany worked together to build a crane that not only takes the prize for its best-of-class lifting capacity but also meets conflicting global transport standards. […]

WITH VIRTUAL PROTOTYPES NOW COMMONPLACE, PARTICULARLY IN the automotive world, you might think engineers have mastered the intricacies of modeling components made from common materials. But the thermoplastic elastomers used […]

STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS CODES ALREADY DO A GOOD JOB PREDICTING THE PERFORMANCE of molded plastic parts. Yet, their results never tell the full story because the mechanical properties of those parts […]

Lasers have a real flair for metalworking. They can cut, weld, heat-treat, and perform various surface modifications. Yet injection molds and similar types of complex tooling mostly consist of components […]

THE ENGINEERS WHO DESIGN MAROTTA CONTROLS' PRECISION PNEUMATIC COMPONENTS SIT just a few yards away from the company's manufacturing plant. And that proximity paid off when they designed parts of […]

WITH ENGINEERING PLASTICS, GOING AROUND IN CIRCLES MAY TURN OUT TO be a good thing. A new cyclic form of polybutylene teraphthalate (PBT) promises to open up new design possibilities […]

LAS VEGAS -- Walking around the huge Consumer Electronics Show here, it's easy to get caught up in all the gee-whiz gadgets. And the electronics makers really have outdone themselves, […]

EXTON, PA -- The scientists who develop new plastics have three levers they can pull when trying to add new functionality to their materials. They can tinker with the polymer […]

Prototyping plastic automotive interior components can be tough. On top of their functional needs, these parts usually have stringent cosmetic requirements that can rule out the use of rapid prototyping […]

Plastic sheet made from polyetherimide (PEI) first found a home in aircraft interiors years ago. Most recently, Boeing picked GE Advanced Material's Ultem PEI for use in its C17 jetliner, […]

CYLINDRICAL AND THIN-WALLED PLASTIC parts can give design engineers a real headache. When made from reinforced plastics, the former often have a weak spot at their knit lines and can […]

PITTSBURGH -- Breaking up doesn't have to be hard to do. In the chemical-company equivalent of an amicable divorce, Bayer Chemicals Corp. this month divvied up its materials portfolio and […]

MOST PEOPLE HAVE BEEN WARNED ABOUT THE DANGERS OF PUTTING METAL IN MICROWAVE OVENS. DEVENDRA and Satyendra Kumar didn't listen, and it's a good thing they didn't. These two brothers, […]

As automakers work to improve both fuel efficiency and safety, they increasingly need to add some lean muscle to their vehicles. Strong, lightweight structural components made from Advanced High Strength […]

PITTSBURGH, PA -- Hybrid injection molding technology, which joins metal and plastic inside the mold to produce structural components that offer the best of both materials, has been around for […]

TROY, MI -- Engineering plastics continue to break new ground in automotive applications. One good place to get a look at that progress is the annual design competition held by […]

PUT DOWN THE SCREWDRIVER. TOSS THE TORQUE WRENCH. SCRAP THE RIVET GUNS, TOO. IN THE future, fasteners won't need any of that stuff: They'll just install themselves with the help […]

Rubber seals may seem simple, but they often face temperature and loading conditions that make it all too easy for the wrong material to fail prematurely. The classic way of […]

Design News readers really know their engineering plastics, and some of them recently took the time to share their insights by taking part in the magazine's annual study of the […]

Powder metal technology; whose near-net-shape capabilities can cut scrap and machining steps, holds out the promise o big cost savings for mass-produced gears. But can they match cut-gear performance in […]

Injection molding just got a whole lot faster. No, not the part of the process that takes place on the molding machine. Those aspects of injection molding that really take […]

NOT TOO LONG AGO, "STRUCTURAL PLASTICS" MEANT "METAL REPLACEMENT." AND TO SOME EXTENT IT STILL DOES. Today's applications, however, also involve the refinement of products that have already embraced plastics […]

ALPHARETTA, GA -- Torlon polyamide-imide (PAI) from Solvay Advanced Polymers already has a good reputation for strength, toughness, and resistance to wear, heat, and chemicals. Those properties, however, don't come […]

Evaluating materials in a lab can be a good way to predict their performance in the field. It can, that is, as long as the materials in question have been […]

AUTOMOTIVE SAFETY HAS COME ALONG WAY SINCE DRIVERS FIRST STARTED BUCKLING UP A HALF CENTURY AGO. But safety systems still have a long way to go. Even with increasingly advanced […]

The linemen who work on high-voltage power lines maybe crazy, but they are not stupid. They take their protective gear seriously, especially the leather and latex gloves that insulate them […]