One of the segments likely to face the greatest challenges in 2022 are automotive plastics manufacturers who will continue to face shortages of the raw materials, composites and resins required for both interior and exterior vehicle parts. 

When faced with potential reliability issues, original equipment manufacturers must quickly find the root cause and determine the risk for other equipment still operating in the field.

Have you had a chance to see the film “Tomorrowland”? It’s a fun glimpse into the future and in many ways we are already there. The story includes a bunch of kids ready to see things very differently when they travel into the future and guess what, modular fixturing appears in the last few minutes of the film featuring a current automotive design studio. 

It all started with the wheel. Moving things, and ourselves, across distances became easier and more efficient with the wheel. Over the centuries, we progressed from carts we pushed ourselves to wagons pulled by animals we domesticated and trained.

When explaining surface finish measurement, it can be helpful to start with the classic metaphor of a desert, as often described by gage maker Taylor Hobson. Imagine grains of sand as roughness, the ripples of sand as waviness, and then the undulating dunes as the surface profile.

Carbon fiber reinforced plastics, or CFRPs, are found throughout the aerospace and automotive industries, as well as in high-performance sporting goods, due to their light-weight, high-strength properties.

The introduction of the PC and the increasing functionality of integrated circuits created a new market for PC-based single-board computers, frame grabbers, I/O peripherals, graphics, and communications boards—the building blocks of today’s embedded electronics and machine vision systems. 

Sansera Engineering in India manufactures components for the automotive and aerospace industries. The quality requirements for engine parts are extremely high and always pose new challenges for Sansera.

In the production of automobiles, there are many different materials that require mechanical testing. When industry changes occur, this ultimately affects the types of testing being conducted.