The company is an aerospace job shop that specializes in the production of jet engine case assemblies, which are cylindrical, structural engine components generally made up of welded fabrications or machined rings.

If something goes wrong on the production line, it can be fairly costly, Janiak said. At Delta, "fairly costly" can range from $5,000 to $10,000, which is the cost of scrapping a single casing.

After facing inconsistencies in its computer-aided manufacturing program, the company recently installed a new CAM system, EdgeCAM, from Pathtrace of Ontario, Calif., and according to Janiak, now reports less line downtime and scrapping of parts.

"There was a time when we were continuously fixing things," Janiak said. "Downtime on the floor is a lot lower now."

Mark Yadach, DCT's vice president of e-commerce, was brought into the company to find ways of optimizing its internal processes. Yadach said he immediately saw that DCT could find a better method of dealing with engineering changes by more closely managing the company's 100,000-item bill of materials. The BOM lists all engineering details of the components and subassemblies that make up the equipment DCT produces. This extensive information is affected whenever the manufacturing system is altered, such as when a customer requests a change in a part design.

Yadach implemented product data management and collaborative workflow technology based on software from SmarTeam of Beverly, Mass. Based on pilot experiences, Yadach projects that within its first year of full implementation, the streamlining effects of these tools will reduce the time needed to complete engineering changes by as much as 85 percent.

These arrangements are helping NIST scientists manipulate atoms at the quantum level. The scientists' goal is to create quantum bits, or qubits, for futuristic quantum computers that, they say, could make today's supercomputers look completely outdated.

Quantum computing could potentially encode information in ways no eavesdropper could intercept. It also could place massive amounts of information in a small number of qubits because it takes advantage of the peculiarities of the quantum nature of matter, according to the scientists. The NIST experiments seek to entangle atoms in such a way that measuring the energy level of one would reveal the energy level of another, even if they happen to be widely separated.

Physicists at NIST's Colorado campus have shown they can entangle four atoms. They now seek to entangle greater numbers of atoms. For this, they're joined by their colleagues in Maryland. The potential computing power for a quantum computer increases exponentially with the number of entangled qubits.

Dinan, a BMW automotive component manufacturer, uses Thinkdesign mechanical design software to ensure that the parts it manufactures mate perfectly with existing BMW stock parts.

Dinan's design engineers must make sure the parts they design mate perfectly to the existing BMW stock parts already on the vehicle. Tolerances are tight and any fault could degrade the vehicle's performance or cause a part not to fit, Dinan said.

For design, Dinan uses Thinkdesign mechanical design software from Think3 of Santa Clara, Calif.

Using the software, the engineers model the part in three dimensions. They then can see what happens to the modeled part as they change various criteria on screen. They also can see where new interference problems are going to show up. This ensures that the part will work before it is produced and sent to the vendor, thus reducing lead time, said Peter Kang, a Dinan design engineer.

The software, Melcor 1.8.5, incorporates the results of 20 years of nuclear power plant safety research since the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island.

By using the latest experimental data, Melcor 1.8.5 can help regulators and utilities more sensibly define their operational margins of safety and minimize unnecessary regulation of the nuclear power industry, said Randy Gauntt, the Sandia project leader.

"It will allow them to revisit some of the perhaps overly conservative regulations and identify areas where no safety enhancements are gained, and then refocus on areas where greater safety precautions might make a difference," Gauntt said.

The software models the whole power plant, from the cooling-system plumbing and control wiring to the physical interactions between nuclear fuel rods and their containment vessels. To use Melcor, the user defines details such as the plant's design and equipment as well as any predetermined operator actions and then specifies an initiating event—such as a rupture in a cooling-system pipe or a power outage. Melcor then calculates a mathematical play-by-play summary of the accident.

Sandia began developing the program in 1982 and released it in 1989. Four updates to the code's capabilities followed. Previous versions are among tools used by U.S. and overseas utilities and nuclear regulators to evaluate the adequacy of plant safety, Gauntt said.

An aneurysm is an abnormal blood-filled dilation of the artery wall. It is often treated surgically, but extreme care is needed to avoid rupture. To assess the danger before surgery, the Italian researchers developed a technique that will allow doctors to evaluate the stresses on the wall.

The researchers first constructed a three-dimensional geometry from a series of two-dimensional scans of the affected area. They then smoothed out the arterial walls on the model and meshed the fluid—the blood—with those walls. This 3-D mesh was read into the Fidap flow modeling and analysis software from Fluent of Lebanon, N.H. The researchers then simulated the motion of the blood.

They repeated the analysis and simulation enough times to find the predicted flow. At that point, they could study velocity, pressure, and wall displacement. Of greater interest, however, were localized results for wall stresses in different sections of the aneurysm. Those results can be coupled with experimental data on stress-limit values to assess the risk of aortic rupture for the patient.

Daniel Gaines, an assistant professor of computer science at the Vanderbilt School of Engineering in Nashville, Tenn., has developed computer software to help solve manufacturing programs and improve efficiency using the tools a company already owns.

The goal, Gaines said, is to help manufacturers develop high-quality, low-cost plans. Machinists sculpt parts by cutting away nonessential segments of stock material. As the emerging part moves through a series of machining operations, different tools slice and puncture the stock. Determining how to machine the part in the fewest number of steps is an important aspect of streamlining efficiency, Gaines said.

Gaines's approach allows the computer to conceive of a wider range of options than the traditional operations that planner programs can generate. His software package is called Resource-Centric.

"The traditional operations planning approach makes too many assumptions," he said. "Our system steps back from the problem and first does a thorough analysis of all the resources, including the stock material to be used and the geometric design of the part. This analysis identifies the types of operations that might be performed to create the part."

The system integrates CAD and computer-assisted process planning, or CAPP, software.

Although neutrons make up half of all visible matter, scientists need those of a specific brightness to conduct research. The SNS will supply 10 times more of these specific neutrons needed for research than any other source, according to the DOE.

The project is being constructed under a partnership among six DOE national laboratories. The neutron source will be located at one of them, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Scientists there are using computational fluid dynamics software to model the flow of fluid and heat to predict temperatures, velocities, and pressures within the SNS.

"We're interested in temperatures within the SNS target, which is bombarded by protons at a very high-energy deposition rate," said Mark Wendel, a heat transfer and fluid flow specialist at Oak Ridge. "Liquid mercury is circulated through the target box to provide a material from which the protons can spallate neutrons."

The mercury also removes the heat from the proton beam, he added. This mercury is the fluid studied.

After the fluid flow and heat transfer is predicted, Wendel and his colleagues use visualization software that graphically maps results in a way that is more intuitive to understand than a series of numbers, he said. The visualization software, EnSight, is from Computational Engineering International of Morrisville, N.C.

"The mathematical model has millions of numbers that must be computed and cannot be adequately understood without being able to visualize them graphically," Wendel said.

By graphically portraying the results on the computer, Wendel and his team can more easily spy problems or errors with the fluid flow models and understand the physics of the flow field, he said.

Like youngsters playing hide and seek, the programs used in the study hunted for and found items they sought faster and more efficiently if they communicated with one another. The programs did their own semblance of computer communication via a message board. Researchers found that this talking back and forth allowed the programs to outperform all previous predator-prey studies, even those in which computers were programmed to specifically use human hunting strategies.

"The findings have a number of possible applications—for example, smart Web crawlers that communicate with one another as they scout the Web automatically retrieving information," said C. Lee Giles, a professor of information sciences and technology at Penn State in University Park. He is co-author of the study.

"One can also imagine military applications or intelligent robots that explore other planets or explore the seabed in groups while talking to one another," Giles added.

In the study, four predator agents inhabiting a virtual four-sided, two-dimensional grid world were set in pursuit of a fifth agent that served as the prey. The agents all moved simultaneously and at the same speed in separate north, south, east, and west directions. No diagonal shortcuts were permitted. The predators couldn't see each other and didn't know each other's location. According to the researchers, that scenario is probably more difficult for the predators than any considered in previous predator-prey studies.

In order to distribute its products via the Internet, The International TechneGroup of Milford, Ohio, a maker of computer-aided engineering software, has announced an agreement with Clickly.com of Amsterdam.

Design Safety Engineering of Ann Arbor, Mich., has released version two of its Designsafe risk assessment software, which is used by manufacturers to assess the risks of their products and processes.

PTC of Waltham, Mass., has shipped its Windchill 5.1 software, which is the latest version of the developer's Web-based collaboration software to link employees via the Internet.

QuickConcept has been released by Cimatron of Livonia, Mich., a developer of computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing software for the tooling industry.

Moldflow of Wayland, Mass., a maker of software for the design and manufacture of plastic products, has issued its Moldflow Plastics Adviser release 5.0.

In order to include Oce printing applications in Catia version five software, Dassault Systemes of Paris has signed what the company calls a component application architecture development partnership with Oce Technologies of Amsterdam.

Coade of Houston, a maker of engineering software, has released CodeCalc version 6.30, an updated edition of the company's software for design and analysis of pressure vessel and heat exchange components.

To let buyers and sellers conduct e-commerce for made-to-order products, Geometric Software Solutions of Mumbai, India, a maker of engineering software packages, has entered a partnership agreement with Cohesia of Dayton, Ohio, a manufacturer of business infrastructure software. According to the agreement, Geometric will provide software services to Cohesia for product development and integration.

ABB Automation of Wickliffe, Ohio, has introduced an integrated suite of automation software and hardware products called Industrial that gives customers a unified architecture on which to conduct their businesswide technology operations.

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