MT Magazine July/August 2022

FEATURE STORY

JULY/AUGUST 2022

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to encounter like-minded people. This is an opportunity that should not be overlooked or underestimated. One of the most important aspects of IMTS 2022 – and this would be the case even had we all not been comparatively isolated from others due to the pandemic for the past couple years – is that visitors not only come to see the new technologies on display but to meet with people from different companies, different countries, and to exchange ideas and experiences. The Pavilions Abrasive Machining/Sawing/Finishing North Building, Level 3 Abrasive machining can remove cubic inches of material while precision grinding provides surfaces measured in Ra. Among the equipment here: Grinders (cylindrical, internal, angular wheelside, creep-feed, through-feed, centerless, surface, abrasive belt, jig, tool and cutter, universal, cam); bench, crankshaft and abrasive cutoff machines; saws (band, cold); lapping machines; balancing machines; honing machines; polishing machines. According to the ISO/ASTM 52900 standard, “Additive manufacturing is the general term for those technologies that, based on a geometrical representation, create physical objects by successive addition of material.” Said more simply, this is a technology that allows you to do things ranging from making things that couldn’t otherwise be made for reasons ranging from complexity to types of materials to creating parts or tools in a matter of days that might otherwise require weeks. Types of additive to be shown: Vat photopolymerization; power-fed fusion; binder jetting; material jetting; sheet lamination; material extrusion; directed energy deposition. Additive Manufacturing West Building, Level 3

Democratization A number of technologies have contributed to the democratization of manufacturing technology. They include: • Networking and communications technologies (thanks, in part, to MTConnect) are now readily available to one person shops, allowing them to link to other similarly sized operations to create a virtual manufacturing operation, even though the facilities are thousands of miles apart. • Robots have gone from being large devices for spotwelding, diecasting, and painting in auto assembly plants to not only small, easy-to-use 6-axis or SCARA devices but to collaborative robots that can be implemented to work alongside people in production facilities of all sizes. • Digital tools – not only for designing components and running machines – have become nearly ubiquitous: A Google search of “CAD for iPad” returns over 57 million results. And digital twins have gone from being something used by NASA in 2010 to usable tools for a wide array of operations. • Additive manufacturing is now something that is as readily available as multispindle machine tools – and both were comparatively expensive to acquire and difficult to use not that long ago. Again, all of this goes to the point of the democratization of manufacturing technologies. Places To Go, People To See Because of the extent of the floorplan at the McCormick Place complex, there is the separation into nine different pavilions, each of which is dedicated to a discrete number of technologies. But there is an aspect to the pavilions that shouldn’t be overlooked: Historically, pavilions have been meeting places. So, those who visit any of the IMTS 2022 pavilions are likely