Today's competitive manufacturing environment demands ever increasing productivity, efficiency and quality. While manufacturers have tended to be quick to look to automation to improve their manufacturing processes, improving yields, reducing waste and shortening production cycles, they've not always thought of the importance of automation to improve their business or human resources processes. Yet automation can yield similar results in these areas.

Copper is the most thermally conductive of the common solids; only silver, cubic boron nitride and diamond are more conductive. This makes copper an excellent choice for plastic injection molds that must remove heat from the injected, molten plastic to make it solidify. However, copper is neither hard nor strong enough in its pure form to serve as an injection mold. Fortunately, metallurgists have developed alloys of copper that retain much of the conductivity while attaining strength and hardness that approaches or even exceeds that of steels. The purpose of this article is to review those copper alloys now common to the injection molding industry.

Siemens PLM Software (Plano, TX) a business unit of the Siemens Industry Automation Division and a leading global provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) software and services, has released NX™, the company’s fully integrated computer-aided design, manufacturing and engineering analysis (CAD/CAM/CAE) solution. NX 8 includes extensive enhancements to its CAE offering–including its widely used NX Nastran® software for solving some of the world’s most challenging simulation problems.

When considering ways to reduce mold setup and improve part removal a moldmaker should explore the benefits for both the moldmaker and the molder by considering the following five technology solutions:

With most new releases of CAM software, the developer will focus on the latest machining strategies that are available in the system. Over the past two years, however, promotional material for new versions has been full of claims about the ability to support the latest hardware developments, such as background processing and multi-threading. This article will explain why these developments are important and the benefits that they can give to the user.

Recycling is part of our everyday lives. At home, recycling is done almost exclusively as our way of protecting the environment. At work—especially with in a manufacturing company—the concept of recycling goes far beyond the curb-side service done at home. By choosing the right recycling program, mold manufacturers can help sustain both the environment and their industry.

When we apply manufacturing economics thinking to the machine investment process, a couple of questions come to mind: what do we want to manufacture and how quickly can we turn our investment into profit.

Much has been written about the benefits of 5-axis machining in recent years. The intention of such information is to educate readers of actual and potential process gains.