Model Airplanes

When the U.S. Army needed a Kiowa helicopter for a raft of tests to hone the aircraft’s military performance, it didn’t rescue a helo from the scrap heap and repurpose it.

Instead, the Army turned to NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, where engineers downloaded computer-aided design files to a 3D printer and began to crank out a scaled model of a helicopter, layer by layer, piece by piece.

And when technicians snapped those pieces together, they had a plastic model of a Kiowa at 37 percent scale to run through rigorous tests in their subsonic wind tunnel.

Last year, NASA administrator Charles Bolden sent a congratulatory message to Langley’s Kiowa team telling them the project represented more than a “demonstrable savings on actual flight tests.”

“It also represents a significant reduction in risk to test pilots and test flight engineers who would have had to fly some of the high-risk ordnance carriage and delivery profiles had we not been able to model them as part of this project,” Bolden wrote.

Building aircraft models for wind tunnel tests is but one way engineers and researchers in Hampton Roads are harnessing 3D printing technology, which has grown beyond just making plastic Lego-like parts.

NASA Langley has a stable of a dozen or so 3D printers that work with powdered metal or metal wire, with resins, plastics and even wax. By depositing layer upon layer of plastic or by melting metals with an electron beam or laser, machines can grow objects from tiny widgets to

Article source: http://www.military.com/daily-news/2014/12/04/3d-printers-build-the-impossible-for-hampton-roads-scientists.html

There’s something quite unusual about the business model that Aras follows for their Innovator software when compared to the rest of the PLM world. It’s a fully functional PLM system, free of charge. Download it from the internet, install it and you’re free to go.

“No catches”, says the Aras chief.




“There is none”, claims Peter Schroer, CEO and founder of Aras Coporation. “The point is that Aras Innovator is an open source solution. Companies of all sizes can install it and start using it in their environment with an unlimited number of users, without incurring any costs at all”.

That’s the “bread and butter” of the business model. However Aras’ Marc Lind, SVP Global Marketing, says that, “consulting for customization, education and other services are less than a third of our revenues. We do not consider the services revenues key to our growth”.

Aras was founded in 2000 with a traditional sales and licensing

Article source: http://www.engineering.com/PLMERP/ArticleID/9068/A-full-PLM-suite-free-of-charge-whats-the-catch-with-Aras.aspx

Communities

Piazza wins Ward 4 alderman seat by drawing long straw

Article source: http://www.sunherald.com/2014/11/30/5936918/participants-race-radio-controlled.html

Question-and-Answer Session

Q – Rob Spingarn

Fantastic. And then we will take couple from the audience, but I’ll start us up. I wanted to ask you a few high level questions to open. The first one being about the vantage point from your current position from your new seats so to speak and the components of that I will do the multi-part question. So, here we’re again. Would the — what’s it like — one, trying to manage two businesses at the same time?

And also what kind of strategy have you and Jim put together here, this essentially a seat has been created and it didn’t exist first, so how you think about that?

Dennis Muilenburg

Yes. Thanks. And as Jim and I have talked about this role and I’ve been in this seat now for about a year, so I’m a year expert here in this role. But three key components to it. One was just spend very direct time with Jim McNerney and frankly, learn by Osmosis in a joint partner with him overall over side of the company.

And a key part of that is driving a one Boeing perspective and culture as we look like to call it and that is gaining leverage across our commercial, defense, and space sector. I’ll come back to that.

The second of three parts has been on some of our big internal needle mover productivity initiatives. So, these are things like Lean implementation, capturing the value quality, first time quality, not only in the factory

Article source: http://seekingalpha.com/article/2728675-the-boeing-companys-ba-management-presents-at-credit-suisse-global-industrials-conference-transcript

Android continues to dominate the smartphone business and will likely do so for the foreseeable future, new data from research firm IDC shows. But overall growth in the smartphone market is slowing.

Total Android shipments this year are expected to hit 1.06 billion when 2014 come to a close, giving Google’s mobile operating system 82.3 percent control over the smartphone space this year, market researcher IDC reported Monday. Apple’s iOS will finish in second place with 13.8 percent share and 178 million shipments, IDC said. Windows Phone will muster just a 2.7 percent share on 35 million smartphone shipments.

The forecast looks especially gloomy for alternative competitors on the mobile scene, IDC said in a statement. “With Android volumes so dominant, it is no longer a possibility for new operating systems like Tizen and

Article source: http://www.cnet.com/au/news/android-continues-to-lord-over-the-smartphone-biz/