All Features
Katie Rapp
A major focus of the current administration is revitalizing American manufacturing as new technologies are changing the way things are made. Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) director Pravina Raghavan recently appeared on Government Matters TV, where she discussed how MEP National Network…
Trupti Dhere
The healthcare industry is known for rapidly adopting advanced technologies that offer improved treatment for various diseases. Consequently, digital twin technology in healthcare has gained popularity during the past few years, owing to the range of advantages it offers.
Digital twin technology…
Etienne Nichols
In a highly regulated industry like medical technology, manufacturing processes must undergo either process verification or process validation to ensure they’re consistently producing the correct result. The question is, which one should you use?
Verification and validation are two different…
Anil More
It’s been decades since air gauging came into existence, and many changes and refinements have been made over the years. It has proved itself as a reliable and accurate method of gauging parts, particularly in cases of close tolerances and fine finishes. Its high accuracy, simplicity, and…
Jennifer Lauren Lee
In a brightly lit subterranean lab at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) sits a room-sized electromechanical machine called the NIST-4 Kibble balance.
The instrument can already measure the mass of objects of roughly 1 kilogram, about as heavy as a quart of milk, as…
Adam Zewe
When deep-learning models are deployed in the real world—perhaps to detect financial fraud from credit card activity or identify cancer in medical images—they are often able to outperform humans.
But what exactly are these deep-learning models learning? Does a model trained to spot skin cancer in…
Mark Hembree
When I started working from home in 1998, it wasn’t by choice. I was writing for a major record label that decided—in so many words—that I was like a painting that didn’t go with the furniture. (Fine. Know what you get when you play New Age music backward? New Age music.)
My panic-stricken…
Belinda Jones
The worldwide pandemic presented unique challenges for every manufacturer in the United States. Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division was no exception. While its factory operations team has always pursued continuous improvement, the disruptions and slowdown related to the pandemic offered a…
NIST
As 2022 draws to a close, we ask NIST’s senior researchers to look ahead to the new year and beyond. They research topics that affect all of us, from indoor air quality to cybersecurity. So we ask our fellows, “How will the technology you are working on today affect society in the years to come?”…
Nisan Lerea
Quality assurance and quality control (QA/QC) are a continual part of any manufacturing process. No matter how many times your factory has executed the same procedure, you must regularly perform quality checks to maintain the same quality level of your process. Quality control on a manufacturing…
Emily Newton
The demand for printed circuit boards (PCBs) will only increase until a superior technology comes of age. The global market for PCBs could rise to $72.3 billion by 2026. PCBs have become essential everywhere, from infrastructure to consumer products.
The overwhelming demand for PCBs for the…
Bryan Christiansen
An important part of production is to carefully monitor and control temperature, speed, volume, weight, or mass. To ensure these measurements are always accurate, manufacturers need to calibrate their equipment and instruments regularly.
Devising a proper equipment calibration schedule can be a…
David L. Chandler
Terahertz radiation, with wavelengths that lie between those of microwaves and visible light, can penetrate many nonmetallic materials and detect signatures of certain molecules.
These handy qualities could lend themselves to a wide array of applications, including airport security scanning,…
Tim Mouw
Metallized substrates such as two-piece metal packaging are expensive to produce, and they make print color-control challenging. Although many in the metal decorating sector are hesitant to embrace color measurement, it’s the fastest, most accurate, and cost-effective way to produce consistent…
NIST
An improvement to a Nobel Prize-winning technology called a frequency comb enables it to measure light pulse arrival times with greater sensitivity than previously possible—potentially improving measurements of distance along with applications such as precision timing and atmospheric sensing.
The…
S. Heather Duncan
A new deep-learning framework developed at the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is speeding up the process of inspecting additively manufactured metal parts using X-ray computed tomography, or CT, while increasing the accuracy of the results. The reduced costs for time, labor,…
Elizabeth Benham
Calling all teachers, parents, and students. It’s easy to learn the metric system—or, as it’s more formally called, the International System of Units (SI). Explore these top 10 tips for teaching the SI. Let’s begin the countdown with....
10. Make it fun!
Integrating metric measurements into play…
Mara Strenger, Svenja Kloss, Markus Schmid
When looking in the fridge, you notice a package of minced meat sitting at the back of one of the shelves, totally forgotten. A check of the best-before date reveals it had expired two days earlier. Like so many consumers, you feel an internal struggle emerging: risk food poisoning or discard a…
Mark Hembree
Many trade shows have disappeared or diminished in recent decades—but not the International Manufacturing Technology Show, a biannual event held every even-numbered year in Chicago, this year from Sept. 12–17. In its 33rd year, IMTS was of sufficient scope to take up nearly half of McCormick Place—…
Leon Chao
I am 100 percent a millennial (lol), which—according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary—means I’m a “person born in the 1980s or 1990s.” To me, being a millennial means belonging to a cultlike group within a large population of present-day wannabe-adults for whom seemingly arbitrary words like…
Bryan Christiansen
CNC (for computer numerical control) machines have made manufacturing easier, faster, and more precise. Supported by the development of IoT technology, the CNC machine market is set to experience significant growth. With that in mind, this seems like a great time to discuss the intricacies of CNC…
Mark Hembree
‘Anyone can hit a home run if they try,” said the great Ty Cobb at the end of the deadball era as Babe Ruth rose to fame in the 1920s. Cobb was unimpressed by Ruth, the Sultan of Swat. “It’s a brute way to approach the game.”
In 2019, Major League Baseball (MLB) seemed to prove Cobb’s point as big…
Tim Mouw
According to autolist.com, more than 80 percent of cars produced today are white, black, or some shade of gray. It’s not necessarily because bright and bold colors are more difficult to produce and match than their grayscale counterparts. They just take longer to get through the inspiration and…
NIST
A novel, quantum-based vacuum gauge system invented by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has passed its first test to be a true primary standard—that is, intrinsically accurate without the need for calibration.
Precision pressure measurement is of urgent…
Prashant Kapadia
Workforce scarcity and remote employment made it challenging to maintain industrial machinery during and after the Covid-19 epidemic. With the global industrial automation market expected to nearly double in the next six years, maintaining an increasing number of assets will result in more…
