{"id":399,"date":"2016-02-29T12:45:30","date_gmt":"2016-02-29T20:45:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/?p=399"},"modified":"2016-03-02T20:52:47","modified_gmt":"2016-03-03T04:52:47","slug":"teaching-old-factories-new-tricks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/2016\/02\/29\/teaching-old-factories-new-tricks\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching Old Factories New Tricks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">There&#8217;s more than one way to s<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-404 alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/files\/2016\/02\/3172457-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"3172457\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\" \/>kin a cat, but you can&#8217;t teach an old dog new tricks. This <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">just about sums up the status of modern manufacturing. Although it may make an entertaining reality show, I don&#8217;t mean to imply that factories are trying to teach old dogs new ways to skin cats.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">It used to be the manufacturing process\u00a0was simple, design a part and pick a material to machine it out of. In the last decade or two, major breakthroughs in engineering have led to the development of drastically different manufacturing techniques. For example, additive manufacturing (e.g. <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/3D_printing\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">3D printing<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Friction_welding\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">friction welding<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">) can reduce material waste while still yielding a part with the same strength and functionality as other methods. Although these new methods have caught the public&#8217;s attention, they don&#8217;t always transition into factories as quickly as one might expect.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Companies tend to be slow to adopt new techniques due to the cost of retooling and a lack of good comparisons between old and new methods. Working in <\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/people.oregonstate.edu\/%7Ehaapalak\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Karl Haapala&#8217;s lab<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, <\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/oregonstate.academia.edu\/HarshaMalshe\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Harsha Malshe<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> hopes to bring some clarity to this process with a computer program that can help companies sort through all the new manufacturing options and compare them with the tried-and-true methods. The program Harsha is helping to build, along with his colleagues in the Haapala lab,\u00a0will allow engineers to submit their part designs and get out a detailed comparison of all the manufacturing options <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-403 alignright\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/files\/2016\/02\/IMG_0434-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"IMG_0434\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" \/>for that part. Hopefully this information will encourage companies to embrace new manufacturing technologies that save money and\u00a0resources,\u00a0or maybe we&#8217;ll find out that the old dog already knows the best tricks. I\u2019m guessing the answer lies somewhere in the middle.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">We&#8217;ll be talking with Harsha on this week&#8217;s episode to learn more about the rapidly changing field of manufacturing engineering.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s more than one way to skin a cat, but you can&#8217;t teach an old dog new tricks. This just about sums up the status of modern manufacturing. Although it may make an entertaining reality show, I don&#8217;t mean to imply that factories are trying to teach old dogs new ways to skin cats. It [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7573,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[745384,2358],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-advanced-manufacturing","category-mechanical-engineering"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7573"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":413,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399\/revisions\/413"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/inspiration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}