Manufacturing Technology

RS Components (RS), the trading brand of Electrocomponents plc, the global distributor for engineers, has launched DesignSpark Electrical, which brings the benefits of design software to all those not already using electrical CAD tools. The new software targets electrical design engineers and other electrical professionals, enabling them to save time and money. Supported by Schneider Electric, DesignSpark Electrical joins the award-winning suite of DesignSpark engineering resources and continues to drive the initiative of removing the barriers to innovation for every engineer. DesignSpark Electrical is a fully specified electrical CAD package delivering time saving and error avoidance, for control panel, machinery and electrical system design. This new free tool provides access to the functionality of electrical CAD for businesses that in many cases cannot reasonably justify the considerable price tag per seat for existing commercial electrical CAD software. A key element of the DesignSpark Electrical software is the integration of a library that comprises more than 250,000 components and parts, including 80,000 from Schneider Electric and 10,000 from RS, which can easily be added to customer designs. Other key features of the highly intuitive and highly functional software include intelligent and specialist electrical design tools, real-time referencing and validity checking to allow the creation of accurate 2D panel layouts, all of which saves time and reduces errors. Also built into the software is Bill-of-Materials (BOM) quote functionality, enabling customers to order parts via RS for their designs, both quickly and easily. The high cost and the learning time required of existing commercial electrical CAD tools have been major barriers to adoption for many companies. The introduction of the highly intuitive DesignSpark Electrical removes these cost barriers in a single stroke and passes on the key benefits of electrical CAD to all engineers. DesignSpark Electrical is available for free download at www.designspark.com.

In the picture: The newest member of the KUKA robot family – the LBR iiwa lightweight robot At the KUKA booth, the visitors of this year’s Hanover Fair can deal with the increasing digitalisation of production and cooperative network of employees and machines. As Europe’s leading supplier of industrial robots and automated production systems, KUKA directly participates with its products and services in the fourth industrial revolution – Industry 4.0. Therefore, robots will be the defining component for industry in the future – while the human takes centre stage. Sustainable automation concepts can only be developed with efficient, flexible and first of all safe production systems respecting the needs of the production staff. KUKA will not only present ways in which KUKA products can improve competitiveness, but also prove its compatibility with the digital world. Across the more than 1000 square meters of space in the Industrial Automation area, KUKA will be presenting innovative solutions that have one key characteristic in common: they are all designed to meet the requirements of Industry 4.0 and bring flexibility in the utilisation of production capacity, in logistics, in the sustainable use of resources. KUKA achieves this by merging the IT world and conventional high-tech industry solutions into complete Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPS). In order to react in a flexible manner, to control process data streams from complex networks around the globe and to network digital controllers from different systems, interfaces based on Mainstream IT infrastructure are essential. This was already a key concept at KUKA in the mid-90s when it brought the first PC-based robot controllers onto the market. Subsequent KUKA innovations and developments also followed this core concept of simple integration. With the newest member of the KUKA robot family – the LBR iiwa lightweight robot and the controller Sunrise designed for […]

Individual operations on the shop floor of an industrial plant can be tracked using a sophisticated automated monitoring system that employs advanced mathematical techniques. To track work in progress, A*STAR scientists combined the popular radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags with rigorous computational processing of ‘discrete-event observers’. This system will enable managers to make better, more timely decisions. “The factory of the future will have zero defects, zero waste and zero accidents,” explains Jinwen Hu, who developed the system with colleagues from the A*STAR Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology. To eliminate the trifecta of defects, waste and accidents, monitoring systems need to extract timely, precise and, most importantly, usable information. To design such a monitoring system, Hu and co-workers, through consultation with manufacturers, identified specific areas of concern as being machine breakdown, staff availability, machine status and work order flow. Getting data from machinery was relatively simple — RFID tags are ubiquitous, being used in everything from shoplifting prevention technology to electronic road-toll collection. However, it was not so easy to figure out how to best use the collected data. “The biggest challenge was designing an efficient scheme that allowed computers to rapidly process the data and engineers to conveniently modify the monitoring rules,” notes Hu. Accordingly, Hu and colleagues incorporated a discrete-event observer in their program. This observer constructs complex events — such as delays in delivery — by using probabilities derived from past plant operations to extrapolate ‘simple event’ raw data collected by scanning RFID tags. In testing the system on the shop floor of a precision machining plant, a simple event occurred when a worker received a work order and scanned the associated RFID. Once the worker had completed the task, the order was passed to another operator and the RFID was rescanned. This process was repeated until the […]

Nuance Power PDF offers the PDF software features that business users need to be productive at a price that supports deployment across the entire enterprise. Power PDF delivers high performance, an intuitive user experience, and value, freeing users from the compromises of traditional PDF applications. To see a demonstration of the new features and benefits of Power PDF, and learn more about Nuance’s Document Imaging division view the Power PDF on-demand broadcast available now. With Power PDF, business users get all the tools they need to create, manage, share, and secure PDF files plus additional features only available from Nuance for document conversion, search, connectivity and more. Power PDF has powerful features to accurately convert PDFs to editable Microsoft Office documents, combine and assemble documents from many sources into a single PDF, and collaborate on PDF files with a powerful toolset. Before Nuance Power PDF, businesses had to make compromises and choose between the limited capabilities of free PDF reader software, low-end PDF solutions, or an expensive solution designed for graphic designers that isn’t engineered for today’s business environment. With its Microsoft Office-style ribbon user interface, Power PDF minimises the learning curve and maximises productivity by enabling users to transition effortlessly between word processing and PDF publishing. The software makes it easy to share and collaborate on work seamlessly across an organisation as well as externally – all while providing document control and security. Power PDF is priced to be affordably deployed to all business users in an enterprise, enabling all employees to assemble, compare, convert, create, dictate, edit, read, redact, scan, search, secure, sign, print and validate PDF documents and forms with unprecedented ease and speed. Key features in Power PDF include: Combine and assemble documents with ease. Combine files and remove or replace pages in complex documents with […]

By Ian Raper, Regional Vice President, Riverbed Australia & New Zealand Automation and the rise of smart, Internet-connected manufacturing equipment (known as M2M or the Internet of Things depending on the device) stand to deliver previously unimaginable productivity gains and cost-savings. While these new technologies promise to simplify the production process, this influx of connected machines and devices also complicates the network used to deliver these efficiency gains. With each new machine connected to a network, finding faults and troubleshooting application performance issues when they occur could be like finding a needle in an ever-increasing haystack. A major source of delay in the troubleshooting process can be found in the way IT teams are structured; specific parts of the infrastructure (e.g. network operations; server operations; application operations) are run by different groups. Each of these teams has visibility into a different part of infrastructure and, traditionally, has had no way to share information effectively. This siloed approach means that the first step in the troubleshooting process is usually a counterproductive round of finger pointing between groups as none have visibility of the whole. But it doesn’t need to be like this The key to effective, real-time performance optimisation and troubleshooting is visibility. If each of these teams has a deep, end-to-end view within and across the complex networks and applications that make up the modern manufacturing process, any performance issue can be quickly resolved. In fact, these issues can even be fixed before they have an effect on the production line by using the same automation that is becoming prevalent on factory floors. At Riverbed, we’ve developed solutions to minimise downtime in the production environment and avoid potentially devastating disruptions that can reverberate through the supply chain. Clearing the fog of war The first strategy is to have the right […]

In PowerSHAPE 2016, reverse engineering of prismatic parts has been made easier. Delcam has added a series of enhancements to its PowerSHAPE Pro software for modelling and reverse engineering that will help users to complete complex designs more quickly and more easily. In addition, a combination of new, more efficient, code and the extension of multi-threaded calculations to many commonly-used tasks will make the software significantly faster than any previous version. Full details, including video demonstrations, are on the Learning Zone – www.delcam.tv/ps2016/lz/en By offering a combination of solid, surface and direct modelling, together with reverse engineering, PowerSHAPE Pro provides the most comprehensive range of design techniques available in a single CAD program. Having all the different technologies in the same package reduces the need to transfer data between multiple programs and so streamlines any modelling-for-manufacture projects that require both reverse-engineering and CAD functionality. The first enhancement in the 2016 release allows groups of features to be copied between two solids in a single operation. While the features do not need to be of the same type, the most common application is expected to be in copying patterns of holes with a single click from one solid to another, for example from one mould plate to any other plate in the mould stack. Another new option to save modelling time is the ability to edit the axis direction of any number of surface or solid primitives simultaneously. Similarly, the axis direction of a group of primitives that are not aligned can be brought into alignment in one operation. PowerSHAPE Pro already had the ability to edit simultaneously the dimensions of groups of primitives. For customers using PowerSHAPE Pro to capture data for reverse engineering, the software can connect directly to most scanning hardware to capture and display scan data in […]

Nuance Power PDF offers the PDF software features that business users need to be productive at a price that supports deployment across the entire enterprise. Power PDF delivers high performance, an intuitive user experience, and value, freeing users from the compromises of traditional PDF applications. To see a demonstration of the new features and benefits of Power PDF, and learn more about Nuance’s Document Imaging division view the Power PDF on-demand broadcast available now. With Power PDF, business users get all the tools they need to create, manage, share, and secure PDF files plus additional features only available from Nuance for document conversion, search, connectivity and more. Power PDF has powerful features to accurately convert PDFs to editable Microsoft Office documents, combine and assemble documents from many sources into a single PDF, and collaborate on PDF files with a powerful toolset. Before Nuance Power PDF, businesses had to make compromises and choose between the limited capabilities of free PDF reader software, low-end PDF solutions, or an expensive solution designed for graphic designers that isn’t engineered for today’s business environment. With its Microsoft Office-style ribbon user interface, Power PDF minimises the learning curve and maximises productivity by enabling users to transition effortlessly between word processing and PDF publishing. The software makes it easy to share and collaborate on work seamlessly across an organisation as well as externally – all while providing document control and security. Power PDF is priced to be affordably deployed to all business users in an enterprise, enabling all employees to assemble, compare, convert, create, dictate, edit, read, redact, scan, search, secure, sign, print and validate PDF documents and forms with unprecedented ease and speed. Key features in Power PDF include: Combine and assemble documents with ease. Combine files and remove or replace pages in complex documents with […]