polymerguru

  📢Time to Get Technical...📢 What are SMC's? How are they manufactured? Sheet molding compounds (SMC) are high-strength composite materials comprising primarily a thermosetting resin, filler(s), and fiber reinforcement (which is usually chopped). The thermosetting resin is typically based on unsaturated polyester, vinyl ester, phenolic, or a modified vinyl urethane. Typical fillers are calcium carbonate (reduced cost), clay (improved surface), alumina trihydrate (fire retardance), talc (improved temperature resistance), mica (improved weathering), and hollow glass microspheres (weight reduction, thermal insulation). SMC is a flow molding material and can therefore be used for manufacturing relatively complex-shaped parts, although the level of complexity reduces as the degree of aligned reinforcement is increased. This schematic summarizes how they are manufactured. The manufacturing of SMC’s is a continuous process that starts when a paste is spread uniformly in a carrier film (...

52% of  #Fortune500  companies have disappeared since the start of the 21st century. 9 out of 10 most valuable companies (public-traded by  #marketcap ) are  #tech  companies #DigitalTransformation   #AI   #futureofwork   #success   #EmergingTech   #SocialMedia   #AutonomousVehicles #innovation Source: Dr.Joerg Storm  

  China's new high-speed maglev train rolls off the production line on Tuesday. It has a designed top speed of 600km per hour. Source David Chang

The 12-meter long structure was developed by engineers at Imperial College London, in partnership with the Dutch Company MX3D. It was created by robotic arms using welding torches to deposit the structure of the bridge layer by layer. The construction took over four years, using about 4,500 kilograms of stainless steel.  “A 3D-printed metal structure large and strong enough to handle pedestrian traffic has never been constructed before,” Imperial co-contributor Professor Leroy Gardner, who was involved in the research, said in a statement. “We have tested and simulated the structure and its components throughout the printing process and upon its completion.” The bridge will be used by pedestrians to cross the capital’s Oudezijds Achterburgwal canal. Its performance will be regularly monitored by the researchers at Imperial College, who set up a network of sensors in different parts of the bridge. The data will also be made available to other researchers worldwide who also want...

Imagine a universe where you could point a spaceship in one direction and eventually return to where you started. If our universe were a finite donut, then such movements would be possible and physicists could potentially measure its size. "We could say: Now we know the size of the universe," astrophysicist Thomas Buchert, of the University of Lyon, Astrophysical Research Center in France, told Live Science in an email.  Examining light from the very early universe, Buchert and a team of astrophysicists have deduced that our cosmos may be multiply connected, meaning that space is closed in on itself in all three dimensions like a three-dimensional donut. Such a universe would be finite, and according to their results, our entire cosmos might only be about three to four times larger than the limits of the observable universe, about 45 billion light-years away. A tasty problem Physicists use the language of Einstein's general relativity to explain the universe. That languag...

A consortium of UK companies, Ultima Forma, Lentus Composites and the National Composites Centre (NCC), have joined forces to develop a novel, high-pressure hydrogen storage tank aimed for use in HGV, bus and off-highway applications. Project HYSTOR has secured funding as part of the Advanced Propulsion Centre’s (APC) Automotive Transformation Fund. The project, led by Ultima Forma, brings together a novel electroformed integrated metallic liner overwrapped with composite that will bring weight reduction and other advantages over current solutions in the market today. The patented thin walled liner provides an impermeable hydrogen membrane onto which structural carbon fibre is wound by Lentus Composites using automated filament winding equipment. Steve Newbury, MD at Ultima Forma, said: “We are delighted to be working alongside Lentus and the NCC to bring to market improved storage solutions for high pressure hydrogen. Hydrogen propulsion systems are c...

  How’s your internetworking these days? At a recent conference, researchers from Japan demonstrated a whopping data transmission rate of 319 Terabits per second (Tb/s). Remarkably, the transmission was carried out over a long distance (3001 km / 1864 miles) and using technology that is already available today. A minute of footage, in high definition, takes about 100 Megabytes. That means that with this speed, you could download around 5,300 hours of footage every second. You could download the entire Spotify library in a few seconds. Wikipedia, you’d download in 0.01 seconds. This speed is almost double the previous record of 178 Tb/s, and almost seven times the earlier record of 44.2 Tb/s. Meanwhile, NASA’s internet tops out at 91 Gb/s (1 Tb = 1,000 Gb = 1,000,000 Mb) and the fastest home internet you can get is about 10 Gb/s. We at ZME feel fortunate to be working with a 1 Gb/s connection. The record was achieved with infrastructure that alread...