All Engineering Articles
  • Steel-toe or composite-toe work shoes: Which should you choose?

    Noel E. Dugenia Manufacturing

    Steel-toed work shoes are more or less the industry standard when it comes to foot protection. These help prevent injuries to the toes in the event a heavy object falls on or rolls over them. In fact, the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety requires employers to ensure their workers are equipped with foot protection equipment if there is a risk of injury to the feet during the course of performing a task. Steel-toed safety shoes fall under this category.

  • Broad-based emerging trends in smart polymers

    Don Rosato Engineering

    In the past century, polymers served elementary functions, such as being structural, insulative or optical. In the new millennium, polymers are increasingly intelligent and capable of adapting to their environment. Smart polymers ensure optimization of their characteristics or that of the system of which they are a part.

  • New products, companies and innovation in healthcare

    Rosemary Sparacio Medical & Allied Healthcare

    Theranos, Karyopharm Therapeutics, Organovo. These companies are at the forefront of leading-edge technology and new products in the healthcare industry. And the new advances in technology and manufacturing have made many of their products not only possible, but also viable and available.

  • Human ‘Organs-on-Chips’ as replacements for animal testing

    Jessica Taylor Science & Technology

    Wyss Institutes Founding Director Donald E. Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., kicked off SLAS2015 by focusing on the engineering of human "Organs-on-Chips" to a filled room of SLAS attendees Feb. 9. Researchers, along with Ingber, have created this innovative technology. Organs-on-a-Chip is a cell culture device — crystal clear with flexible polymers and the size of a computer memory stick — that contains hollow channels lined by living cells and tissues that imitate human cellular response far more effectively and realistically than Petri dish cultures.

  • Out-of-autoclave here to stay for high-quality composites

    Aldo Crugnola, Nick Schott and Don Rosato Engineering

    The manufacturing of high-quality structural composite components for aerospace applications has historically involved autoclave curing, a time-consuming, high-labor, and capital-intensive manufacturing process. As the aerospace and defense industries look to lower costs, composite parts manufacturers are searching for low-cost alternatives to traditional autoclave molding processes that can produce the same mechanical performance that autoclave curing provides. Both commercial and academic research and development have been focusing on a variety of liquid molding or low-pressure consolidation processes to meet this need for lower cost "out-of-autoclave" composite molding.

  • Has the oil price hit its floor?

    Stefanie Heerwig Natural Resources

    Abdulla Al-Badri, secretary general of OPEC, announced recently that oil prices might have reached their floor and could even rise to up to $200 per barrel in the near future. This is a surprising comment, given OPEC's resistance to decrease its oil production and complaints by struggling oil exporters like Nigeria and Venezuela. In fact, Al-Badri's comment was in response to the biggest one-day gain in oil prices since 2009. Brent rose almost 8 percent and finished above $50 per barrel while Western Texas intermediate crude jumped by 7 percent to $53 per barrel.

  • MES helps manufacturers get great quality every time

    Alan Kelsky Manufacturing

    Wouldn't it be nice if the project manager of a newly redesigned product that is a best seller of the company could push a few buttons and find out a wealth of information about the product? Unfortunately, the system in many plants today for getting this information has the project manager walk all over the factory to find out the answers to these questions.

  • Innovative medical plastic applications breaking into new areas

    Don Rosato Engineering

    The U.S. market for the medical sector is the largest and most sophisticated in the world. As a rule of thumb, the U.S. medical device market and most of its segments represent about half of the world market (the European market representing 25 percent).

  • When it comes to creating connected devices, keep it simple

    Ryan Clark Science & Technology

    Companies marketing connected devices to consumers should remember one point: the less complicated the better. Consumers gravitate toward the simple and convenient, as well as products that ensure privacy and security. Connected devices that can provide these attributes, while also presenting the connectivity promised by the Internet of Things will prove invaluable to consumers and profitable to tech companies.

  • 3-D printing outpaces the FDA

    Alan Kelsky Manufacturing

    The watchdog in the United States for medical devices is the esteemed government agency known as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The FDA, however, is flummoxed about how to handle 3-D printing of medical devices. It's not that the FDA has lost its smarts, it's just that the 3-D printing technology has spread so quickly, they are behind the curve.