The
Engineer's
Blog

Topics as varied as Big Data, Industry 4.0, Digital Transformation, Crowdworking, Generation Y , Work 4.0 and 3D-printing have been discussed in 2016, and many of these will have significant influence on the working world over the next few years. This also applies to mechanical engineering. We would like to refer to three terms that have gained importance in 2016.

Especially in narrow spaces, couplings can only be inspected visually, because the coupling is hardly accessible with conventional measuring devices. Atypical operation noise or vibrations are generally the first signals that there is something wrong with the coupling.

3D printing meanwhile offers outrageous possibilities also for mechanical engineering; some highlights have been presented at the formnext 2016. This technology used to be considered as expensive, limited and quite slow, but the rapid development in this field led to innovative and flexible systems for production. Other news we have been really enthusiastic about are further developed augmented or virtual reality systems which can improve processes in manufacturing industries.