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Stratasys, BASF partner on new polypropylene for 3D printing

A new additive manufacturing material from Stratasys and BASF is aimed at driving greater part quality, versatility, and cost efficiency. SAF™ PP is recognized for its exceptional chemical resistance and airtight capabilities, making it the ultimate choice for complex applications across various industries. It can also be welded to other polypropylene components.
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Cam followers with space-saving polymer outer ring design

The new CFL Series cam follower from IKO International boasts a unique, space-saving outer ring design and polymer layer that exceeds the capabilities of conventional resin-type cam followers. Many conventional cam followers press-fit a layer of resin onto the unit's standard outer ring to maintain radial load capacity and provide quiet, clean, and durable operation. However, this thicker assembly makes it difficult to fit into constrained spaces. The CFL Series significantly improves on this design with a polymer layer that is molded directly onto the IKO exclusive thin-walled steel outer ring. This construction solves the dilemma of being able to install a cam follower with special polymers, offering self-lubricating and shock-absorbing properties into existing applications.
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NEW! Semi-automatic pin installation technology from SPIROL -- Better, faster fastening

SPIROL's new video showcases their updated Model PR and Model CR Semi-Automatic Installation Machines for Pins, Alignment Dowels, and Bushings. The video demonstrates how to operate the machine, details standard features, and optional quality and error-proofing enhancements. More than 80% of the components in this installation equipment are standard, pretested, production-proven, off-the-shelf parts. This translates into faster delivery, greater reliability, and lowest cost for equipment of comparable quality.
View the video.

Advanced tips for CNC designs and drawings: On-demand webinar

Greg Paulsen and Steve Zimmerman from Xometry present a comprehensive understanding of CNC design principles, what features are considered common, and what can drive costs. The experts also go through guidance to make great technical drawings to communicate design intent to manufacturers. Lots of good info here. Flip through now and take it all in later when you have the time.
View the video. No registration required.

Get a 24-piece bearings sample box from igus

igus has a new and improved 24-piece iglide^® sample box that engineers can request and receive gratis. All iglide components are self-lubricating, resistant to dirt and dust, and offer low rates of wear. The sample box contains bearings, gears, piston rings, and more, and includes many of the most widely used iglide materials. Nothing like having the materials in hand to really check them out.
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Couplings provide stable control in challenging stepper/servo motor applications

Zero-Max's ServoClass-HSN Couplings address noise and vibration issues that can be experienced in high-gain, high-speed stepper/servo motor applications such as linear actuators, high-response gantry systems, pick-and-place systems, and semiconductor manufacturing equipment. Featuring a Highly Saturated Nitrile Rubber (HSN/HNBR) flex element, these couplings are specifically designed for maximum damping and performance. They incorporate the field-proven ServoClass clamping hub system and have a zero-backlash design.
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New infinitely reconfigurable and reusable mold tech

UK-based company Fyous is launching the world's first infinitely reusable molding technology that can shapeshift in under 20 minutes, producing zero tooling waste and making usable parts 14 times faster than 3D printing. Sort of like a kid's pin art toy, Fyous' PolyMorphic molding can be set, used, and then reset to help create parts from carbon fiber, polyurethane, PET sheet (thermoformed), foods like chocolate, and more.
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New disk-type flexible couplings

Stock Drive Products/ Sterling Instrument (SDP/SI) has expanded their selection of flexible couplings to include the single disk-type couplings (short-type) series S50XHSM and the double disk-type couplings (standard length-type) series S50XHWM. The disk-type flexible couplings are an economical option that provides greater torque capability and improved performance in a reduced size, with torque ratings of 0.6 up to 12 Nm -- an improvement over similar products.
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What is a Heatric Printed Circuit Heat Exchanger?

According to Parker Hannifin, "A Printed Circuit Heat Exchanger is a robust, corrosion-resistant, high-integrity plate-type heat exchanger manufactured using diffusion bonding." Learn about the technology and why Heatric, a Parker brand, "can manufacture a unit up to 85% smaller and lighter than traditional technologies such as shell and tube heat exchangers."
Read this informative Parker blog.

Top Product: 3M Friction Shims -- Why have more than 300 million been sold?

3M Friction Shims are small, thin steel shims with a big impact. They can increase maximum load and peak torque in bolted connections without additional fasteners or redesigns. What else makes them so popular -- and so useful?
Read the full article.

Big news from Smalley! New online store

Smalley's customers for the highest-quality retaining rings and wave springs now have a new procurement option: the Smalley online store. This new service channel is a first for the renowned rings and springs provider. After creating an account, approved users gain access to: convenient 24/7 online ordering that includes more than 11,000 standard parts, real-time product pricing, easy reordering with saved history and wish lists, and a quick checkout. No more waiting for an RFQ response to purchase!
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New robotic parts feeding system claims to be a game changer

TM Robotics has launched a revolutionary new robotic feeding system called Infinifeed™ to the North American market. Powered by Shibaura Machine's advanced THE series of industrial robots, the Infinifeed is an automated feeding system that addresses the common challenges of parts feeding and sorting. Designed by DOMA Automation and integrated by Tera Automation, Infinifeed uses a unique parallel belt conveyor system with opposing motion. This innovative design, equipped with diverters and a 2D vision system, ensures seamless part feeding and sorting.
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V-Conform O-ring Belts -- the Ultra-Drive Belts

V-Conform™ Reinforced O-ring Belts from Dura-Belt are bi-modulus (rubber reinforced with elastic stretchy nylon), so they provide greater tension than solid polyurethane belts. These belts have soft, tiny ribs that conform to standard 3/16-in. roller grooves, so they can replace round elastic belts while maintaining grip and tension. Lots of benefits, including: energy savings, motorized drive roller (MDR) protection, bearing and shaft hole wear prevention, and more.
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EXAIR's new AR Mobile App enhances user experience

The new EXAIR AR Mobile App provides users with a handy compressed air reference tool for over 570 different EXAIR products. The app expedites the solution-finding process by allowing users to select their specific sizes and performance requirements, place a 3D version of the product in their actual workspace using Augmented Reality, and navigate to a page to purchase -- all from their mobile device. The app includes a library of conversion calculators. Available in both the Apple and Google Play Stores.
Learn more.

ClampDisk micro fastener is new alternative for automotive and consumer electronics

Designed as a unique alternative in assemblies for the automotive and consumer electronics markets, the ClampDisk Press-on Fastener is a new offering from PennEngineering that delivers a fast, simple way to achieve sheet-to-sheet clamped fastening while replacing the use of standard screws, nuts, and adhesives. The most common challenges that can be eliminated or reduced by using ClampDisk include over installation, cross threading, stripped screw heads, broken screws, and damaged product. This fastener can be removed easily with a sharp-edged tool.
Learn more and see how ClampDisk works.

New research shows why you don't need to be perfect to get some jobs done in the long run

When neuroscientists think about the strategy an animal might use to carry out a task -- like finding food, hunting prey, or navigating a maze -- they often propose a single model that lays out the best way for the animal to accomplish the job.

However, in the real world, animals -- and humans -- may not use the optimal way, which can be resource intensive. Instead, they use a strategy that's good enough to do the job but takes a lot less brain power.

In new research, scientists at Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, VA, set out to better understand the possible ways an animal could successfully solve a problem, beyond just the best strategy.

The work shows there are a huge number of ways an animal can accomplish a simple foraging task. It also lays out a theoretical framework for understanding these different strategies, how they relate to each other, and how they solve the same problem differently.

Some of these less-than-perfect options for accomplishing a task work nearly as well as the optimal strategy but with a lot less effort, the researchers found, freeing up animals to use precious resources to handle multiple tasks.

"As soon as you release yourself from being perfect, you would be surprised just how many ways there are to solve a problem," says Tzuhsuan Ma, a postdoc in the Hermundstad Lab who led the research.

The new framework could help researchers start examining these "good enough" strategies, including why different individuals might adapt different strategies, how these strategies might work together, and how generalizable the strategies are to other tasks. That could help explain how the brain enables behavior in the real world.

"Many of these strategies are ones we would have never dreamed up as possible ways of solving this task, but they do work well, so it's entirely possible that animals could also be using them," says Janelia Group Leader Ann Hermundstad. "They give us a new vocabulary for understanding behavior."

Looking beyond perfection
The research began three years ago when Ma started wondering about the different strategies an animal could possibly use to accomplish a simple but common task: choosing between two options where the chance of being rewarded changes over time.

The researchers were interested in examining a group of strategies that fall between optimal and completely random solutions; they were "small programs" that are resource limited but still get the job done. Each program specifies a different algorithm for guiding an animal's actions based on past observations, allowing it to serve as a model of animal behavior.

It turns out, there are a lot of such programs -- about a quarter of a million. To make sense of these strategies, the researchers first looked at a handful of the top-performing ones. Surprisingly, they found they were essentially doing the same thing as the optimal strategy, despite using fewer resources.

"We were a little disappointed," Ma says. "We spent all this time searching for these small programs, and they all follow the same computation that the field already knew how to mathematically derive without all this effort."

The researchers were motivated, however, to keep looking -- they had a strong intuition that there had to be programs out there that were good but different from the optimal strategy. Once they looked beyond the very best programs, they found what they were looking for: about 4,000 programs that fall into this "good enough" category. More importantly, more than 90% of them did something new.

They could have stopped there, but a question from a fellow researcher spurred them on: How could they figure out which strategy an animal was using?

The question prompted the team to dive deep into the behavior of individual programs and develop a systematic approach to thinking about the entire collection of strategies. They first developed a mathematical way to describe the programs' relationships to each other through a network that connected the different programs. Next, they looked at the behavior described by the strategies, devising an algorithm to reveal how one of these "good enough" programs could evolve from another.

They found that small changes to the optimal program can lead to big changes in behavior while still preserving performance. If some of these new behaviors are also useful in other tasks, it suggests that the same program could be good enough for solving a range of different problems.

"If you are thinking about an animal not being a specialist who is optimized to solve just one problem, but rather a generalist who solves many problems, this really is a new way to study that," Ma says.

Where do the results go from here?
The new work provides a framework for researchers to start thinking beyond single, optimal programs for animal behavior. Now, the team is focused on examining how generalizable the small programs are to other tasks and designing new experiments to determine which program an animal might be using to carry out a task in real time. They are also working with other researchers at Janelia to test their theoretical framework.

"Ultimately, getting a strong grasp on an animal's behavior is an essential prerequisite to understanding how the brain solves different types of problems, including some that our best artificial systems only solve inefficiently, if at all," Hermundstad says. "The key challenge is that animals might be using very different strategies than we might initially assume, and this work is helping us uncover that space of possibilities."

Source: Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Published July 2024

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