The month of April features Earth Day, the one day each year that focuses attention on the varying and interconnected challenges and solutions to problem’s impacting the Earth’s ability to sustain life. These include pollution, energy demands, climate change, and a host of other issues. For some time now, motor and drive manufacturers have been […]
Baldor Electric launches new website with powerful search and download capabilities
Baldor Electric Company recently launched its new Baldor.com website, a robust destination site for North American industrial motor and mechanical users. “The new site not only showcases our broad product offering and our strong product brands, but it does so in a much easier and faster way than ever before,” said Tracy Long, Vice President […]
More money for manufacturing, but is it enough?
During a visit to Cleveland earlier this week, President Obama announced nearly $500 million in new manufacturing initiatives. The plan is to use the $500 million in a number of ways, including $150 million ($75 million of which would be federal funds, with the other $75 million coming from private investment) for creating a competition […]
Technology Tuesdays Podcast: Peter Dettmer on manufacturing and education
For this week’s Design World Technology Tuesdays Podcast, I spoke with Peter Dettmer, Co-program Director for Automated Manufacturing Systems Technology at Madison Area Technical College in Madison, WI. We spoke about one of the biggest challenges to recruiting young people into the manufacturing industry; reshaping the image of manufacturing from a dirty, greasy job in […]
Wisconsin technical college develops automated manufacturing program
Rick Jacobs Co-program Director for Automated Manufacturing Systems Technology Madison Area Technical College Madison, Wisconsin For many people, the word “manufacturing” conjures up images of monotonous manual labor in dingy factories. Part of Peter Dettmer’s job is correcting that misperception. Dettmer co-chairs the Automated Manufacturing Program at Madison Area Technical College (Madison College). Madison College […]
Top encoder trends for 2015: Smarter, more reliable designs
As critical components in motion control systems, encoders have come a long way from the mostly mechanical devices of yesteryear. We asked some leading encoder manufacturers to tell us how encoder designs are changing and what industries and applications are driving those changes. Here’s what those manufacturers said. 1. What are some of the key […]
Gearmotors: More integration, more applications
Gearmotors have been around since at least the early 20th century, so it’s a fairly well-established technology. (A basic gearmotor is a motor designed with an integrated gear reducer.) However, that doesn’t mean that gearmotors have not been improved upon over the years. Nor does it mean that they’re an outdated technology. In fact, there […]
New trends in electric motors: Efficiency, power density, torque
If there’s one trend that’s prevalent in motors of all kinds, it’s the theme of increasing performance, more specifically a trio of highers: higher efficiency, higher power density and higher torque density. These are incremental improvements in motor performance that are at least partly driven by the Department of Energy (DOE) energy efficiency requirements, said […]
Drives: Configurable and integrated
A drive, at its most basic level, is a device that controls the speed of a motor. And there are as many drives as there are motor types and then some: drives for ac motors, dc motors and variable frequency drives among others. Over the years, a lot of advances in motion control systems have […]
Z1000U HVAC Matrix Drive from Yaskawa
The Drives & Motion Division of Yaskawa America, Inc. has released the Z1000U HVAC Matrix Drive, which provides extremely low harmonic distortion in a space-saving design, along with the same HVAC-specific features as the standard Z1000. This single component solution achieves excellent low distortion levels all by itself, completely without the need for additional countermeasures […]