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Spend enough time on shop floors and you’ll learn about the two different groups of skilled workers that reside there. On one side are the old-school machinists—skilled craftspeople who use their hands, eyes and ears to guide machine tools. On the other side are the programmers and engineers.

For ABB, robotic welding comes down to a never-ending process of ensuring parts are suitable for laser joining and developing the appropriate processes. To that end, ABB is refining a recent innovation to improve beam delivery speeds and has developed software for on-the-fly welding in tandem with Trumpf’s Intelligent Programmable Focusing Optic (IPFO).

Complexity is pervasive in today’s component design and manufacturing processes. In the latest product lifecycle management (PLM) software, manufacturers get more choices, with new functionality being added to help visualize manufacturing processes with technologies that include augmented reality (VR) and virtual reality (VR).

Moldmakers are under constant pressure to speed up the moldmaking process, improving their processes and product quality while boosting productivity.

Manufacturing operations depend on getting the right information at precisely the right moment, ensuring that products get built on time, to quality specs. With the latest enterprise resource management (ERP) software, this critical data flow is often coming via the cloud, as more manufacturers become comfortable with it as a repository for key manufacturing information.

Q&A with Ben Mund, Senior Market Analyst, CNC Software Inc.

While EDMs offer the benefits of holding tight tolerances, working on nearly any metal, and being well suited for delicate or fragile parts, knowledgeable operators for the machines are increasingly hard to find and robots can’t always fill the gap. Automated processes in the machines, newer designs and features of Industry 4.0 are helping to solve the problem.

Researchers at Penn State University (University Park, PA) have devised a novel method for sintering, a widely used manufacturing process for powdered materials. The new process, which uses much less time and energy than current approaches, could have global implications on manufacturing and energy savings and pave the way for new discoveries.

Lasers — well-established tools in the manufacture of medical devices—are continuing to break ground by producing smaller, more precise and more functional parts thanks to faster pulse speeds at lower cost, new applications and the marriage of laser processing to Swiss-style machining.

Starting this month, TechFront has a new format that spotlights manufacturing research programs at key universities, followed by summaries of recent research in SME’s Journal of Manufacturing Systems, Journal of Manufacturing Processes and Manufacturing Letters, all published by Elsevier Ltd.