What were you thinking about the last time you traveled on a plane? Your seat assignments, the weight of your suitcase or finding the right gate? Perhaps you were worried about takeoff or experiencing turbulence on your flight. But did you ever stop to wonder about the braking system, about if—or how—the plane would land and stop safely?

For the millions of passengers flying in and out of airports every day, it’s easy to take touchdown for granted. But for the team members in Parker’s Aerospace Group, braking has the potential to revolutionize air travel and pave the way for a better tomorrow.

“The hardest part is not making the airplane fly,” explains Grant Puckett, group chief engineer for electrification at Parker Aerospace. “We’re focused on making sure you land safely and continuing to provide the assurance society expects from the airplane industry.”

Now imagine boarding a plane where the brakes are as efficient and reliable as those in your electric car. While consumers may still be relatively early in their adoption of electrification technology, the aerospace industry has been working towards electric planes for decades, seeking ways to increase efficiency and reduce environmental impact. And Parker’s new electric braking system (Ebrake®) not only enhances safety and efficiency but also reflects progress toward greener, more sustainable air travel.

“Airplanes need to be able to stop when they land in all imaginable conditions,” says Puckett. “Our Ebrake uses electronic power to do that. This development is crucial because it provides electronic control for anti-skid algorithms and unique diagnostic capabilities, all while using less power and contributing to overall fuel savings.”

Traditional hydraulic braking systems are powerful but complex, and often require extensive maintenance. In contrast, the Ebrake’s electro-mechanical actuation is simpler, more reliable and more efficient.

“By eliminating hydraulic systems we reduce the plane’s weight, leading to significant fuel savings and easier maintenance,” Puckett adds. “This not only benefits airlines but also helps the environment by reducing carbon emissions​​.”

Indeed, Parker’s acquisition of Meggitt in 2022 has created a synergy of complementary technologies, particularly in electrification.

“The blend of Parker and Meggitt offers us the opportunity to think about vertical integration and draw on each other’s strengths to deliver superior solutions to our customers,” summarizes Jennifer Osbaldestin, general manager of Parker Aerospace’s Braking Systems Division.

The system’s successful implementation on the Airbus A220 is proof positive: “The Ebrake system is not only reducing maintenance needs but also enhancing safety by eliminating the need for hydraulic oils,” says Osbaldestin. “This innovation aligns with the growing demand for more sustainable and efficient aviation solutions​​.”

It also aligns with Parker’s Purpose, Enabling Engineering Breakthroughs that Lead to a Better Tomorrow. “Our Ebrake system is not just about efficiency; it’s about making a real impact on our environment,” emphasizes Puckett. “By reducing fuel consumption and emissions, we’re helping to create a more sustainable future for aviation.”

Looking ahead, there are several opportunities on the horizon, with advancements in air mobility and sustainable technologies leading the way. Osbaldestin shares her optimism: “The advanced air mobility sector is booming, and Parker is at the forefront with our innovative Ebrake technology. We’re committed to providing smarter, easier-to-maintain solutions that support our sustainability goals.” By combining the strengths of Parker and Meggitt and focusing on innovative solutions, Parker is not only improving the efficiency and safety of air travel but also setting a standard for future technological advancements. This purpose-driven approach ensures that every engineering breakthrough contributes to a better, more sustainable world.

The post Electrification Takes Flight: How Parker’s Ebrake® is Transforming Air Travel appeared first on Engineering.com.

What began as a Nitinol processing service more than 30 years ago has transformed into a fully integrated Nitinol production program – from raw material melt to customized finish – with Fort Wayne Metals emerging as the largest independent producer of Nitinol products in the medical device industry.

Fueled by an innovative spirit and a commitment to support customers from concept to full-scale production, we continuously expand our manufacturing capabilities and deepen our materials expertise. Ultimately, this leads our team to create tailored Nitinol product offerings – bar, sheet, custom-shaped wire, actuator wire, and shape-set parts – used in medical devices ranging from stents and guidewires to retrieval baskets and orthodontic files.

Our melted Nitinol can be used in our broad range of product offerings because we offer both standard material conforming to ASTM F2063 and a premium option for fatigue-dependent applications. Additionally, to meet the growing demand for increasingly smaller and more complex medical devices and less invasive treatments, we are a global leader in precision fine and ultrafine wire capabilities – customizing material in diameters as small as 0.0127 mm [0.0005 in]. Since 2012, Fort Wayne Metals has sold more than 650,000 pounds of our melted Nitinol in product form primarily to the medical device market.

Check out our entire Nitinol portfolio at fwmetals.com/what-we-do/materials/nitinol

Expanding Nitinol melting capabilities

With an eye always toward the future, CEO and Chairman Scott Glaze has long believed Fort Wayne Metals could better support customers by building a state-of-the-art facility dedicated to melting Nitinol, positioning the company to control the entire production process of the material.

“By controlling the process from start to finish, we can provide consistent quality and delivery,” says Glaze. “This is especially important in the medical device industry, where delays can have significant consequences.”

The amount of Fort Wayne Metals-melted Nitinol supporting the medical device industry only continues to grow. We doubled our Nitinol melt output in 2023, with 74% of all the Nitinol products sold made from our melted material. As a result of Plasma Arc Melt furnace upgrades this year, we substantially enhanced our melting capabilities and capacity. What’s more, a second VAR (Vacuum Arc Remelting) furnace becoming operational in early 2025 will again help double Nitinol capacity, enabling us to melt as much as 1,000,000 pounds of Nitinol annually.

Because of these recent expansions and our vertical integration to secure the Nitinol supply chain, we are in a position to provide more advantageous lead times, minimize potential bottlenecks, ensure quality control, offer stable pricing, and give customers peace of mind as they scale their operations or develop new products.

“Our strategic investments reflect our long-term commitment to the medical device industry,” Glaze explains. “We are all in, and we want our customers to have confidence in us as their partner of choice, now and in the future.”

Get in touch with a technical representative in your area: fwmetals.com/contact/find-your-rep

Broadening Nitinol product offerings

Expanding our melting capabilities is not just about volume – it’s also about sustaining the flexibility to do what we do best – innovate. Whether creating a new product form or developing cleaner Nitinol used to advance cutting-edge medical devices, we help customers push boundaries.

We’re driving progress with the launch of three new Nitinol products in 2024:

• Nitinol DFT® flat wire: Significantly increases radiopacity compared to round wire, enhancing the visibility of medical devices in X-ray imaging
• Nitinol helical turkshead wire: Offers the same superelastic properties with reduced friction, popular for guidewire applications
• Nitinol <28µm: Low-inclusion material customized for applications where fatigue is critical

These recent innovations reflect our diverse and growing product portfolio and are the result of our exceptional research and development capabilities that leverage our technical expertise and advanced processing technologies to support prototyping and next-generation projects. “We see ourselves as more than a supplier – we’re an innovation partner,” Glaze explains. “Our goal is to help our customers achieve their vision, whether it’s a breakthrough device or a lifesaving technology.”

Fort Wayne Metals has been at the forefront of this transformative material’s journey since 1991, serving as a reliable and trusted collaborator to medical device manufacturers worldwide. “By combining technical guidance, strategic investment in technology, and a relentless focus on product innovation,” says Glaze, “we are not just meeting the needs of today’s medical device market – we are shaping the future of what’s possible with Nitinol.”

Learn more about our history of innovation through R&D at fwmetals.com/resources/technical-literature

About Fort Wayne Metals

A leading manufacturer of precision materials used in life-improving medical devices, Fort Wayne Metals is dedicated to making Northeast Indiana and the world a better place. As committed as we are to supporting our customers’ medical technologies, our more than 1,700 employees are just as committed to contributing to community organizations and causes. Whether it’s providing the world with customized material solutions to support the medical device industry or championing efforts that lift up local communities, we are passionate about making lives better.

Ready to talk? Let’s connect you with a technical representative in your area fwmetals.com/contact/find-your-rep

Sponsored content by Ft. Wayne Metals

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By ASME Staff

As manufacturers and mechanical engineers implement digital manufacturing tools and techniques to take their organizations into the future, geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T) continues to play a crucial role in achieving part quality and gross margins. “The fundamental principles of GD&T apply regardless of advances in manufacturing processes or automation technologies,” states Israr Kabir, ASME’s Director of Emerging Technology. “All processes introduce variations from the ideal CAD model representation that must be managed by both design (creating specification) and manufacturing teams (translating design specifications to machine setup and operation).

How can you ensure GD&T data is primed to transition seamlessly into this new way of working? Start by considering these questions.

1. Are you using consistent standards across the organization? 

Consistency enables greater collaboration, because it means everyone is using a shared language with a clear, understood meaning behind each and every symbol. If engineering teams are still using a mash-up of formal standards and ad hoc annotations, now is the time to get everyone on the same (digital) page. You may not realize that there are two GD&T standards currently in use: The ASME Y 14.5-2018 standard, published by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, measures and verifies the schematics of a product, and is used by roughly 86% of U.S. manufacturing companies, according to a survey by GD&T Basics. The ISO Geometrical Product Specifications (GPS) standard, published by the International Organization for Standardization, is designed to both specify and verify a part’s geometry, as well as to calibrate geometry-verifying instruments.

2. Is your GD&T data incorporated into digital models?

Many engineers rely on a combination of 2D and 3D renderings, but this hybrid approach means any manual change is an opportunity for error, misunderstandings, and delays. By incorporating GD&T data into your model-based definition, or digital twin, that information becomes part of one consistent, easy-to-access artifact. Even as the design winds its way through various departments and to the production floor, the data is included in the model and any adjustments are included in the model.

Most manufacturing organizations manage their 3D measurement data files and folders manually. If your organization is only adopting digitization halfway, with one foot in the new ways of manufacturing and one foot still in the old, you’re not only hindering your own efficiency but hampering any further digitization efforts.

3. Is GD&T data positioned consistently within digital models? Digital twins and virtual 3D models may not yet dominate engineering, but now is the time to develop robust routines and clear consistency so engineering teams aren’t breaking bad habits later. The majority of engineers who incorporate GD&T data into 3D models do so by adding it directly to the syntax (23% of respondents), according to a survey by Engineering.com. Fewer (15%) add it to the semantic model. What matters more than which method you prioritize is that you pick one to prioritize—and stick with it.

4. Have you given thought to how to maximize the benefit of your GD&T data?

There are plenty of ways that this data store can be of profit-boosting, efficiency-increasing use to you—presuming it’s robust, consistent, and standardized, as explored above. But none of those can come to fruition if you haven’t yet considered how to make the most of the data you capture. For example, have you given thought to incorporating Internet of Things (IoT) sensors in your calibration and inspection instruments? By marrying these sensors with the bevy of GD&T data you already have in hand, your organization can inspect products without an iota of data being manually entered.

5. Have you developed a system to address problems in your GD&T data?

One of the chief benefits of GD&T is the ability to quickly spot errors within designs or products—and the faster these can be identified and corrected, the better, considering the waste and inefficiency that can result from design or manufacturing inaccuracies. To that end, does your organization have a system in place to reiterate ideas and designs once errors like these are spotted during the GD&T verification process? Routinizing this correction process helps avoid slowdowns and any costly reworking down the line.

As the digitization train rolls on, barreling ahead into a new future of manufacture, your GD&T methods, measurements, and metrics for further improvement must keep pace. Be sure to stay current with the latest ASME 14.5 Standards, check out the entire GD&T Course Collection for upskilling opportunities.

Sponsored content by ASME

The post Is Your GD&T Data Ready for Digital Transformation? appeared first on Engineering.com.

As the power density of electronics devices go up, so does the need for chip and system thermal management. One way to cool the components down is to add a heatsink. heatsinks uses conduction, convection and sometimes radiation to enhance the heat transfer from a hot surface to a cooler fluid. Many factors such as cost, manufacturability and weight need to be considered when choosing a heatsink. How the heatsink gets attached to the component is also critical.

During this 45 minute presentation, we will focus on how heatsinks work and how to design a heatsink while considering all the critical factors such as size, airflow, cost and attachment methods. We will also investigate how, using simulation, the heatsink design could be optimized and validated in the application environment. Engineers involved in board and chassis design would find this session very educational.

What You Will Learn

• How to design a heatsink for a specific electronics cooling application
• To visualize the airflow around the heatsink and identify potential bypass areas
• Estimate heatsink thermal resistance
• Use Response Surface Optimization to come up with the best heatsink design for the considered environment

The post Heatsink 101: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know Web Seminar – Mentor Graphics appeared first on Engineering.com.