Designing for the Future

The 2003 National Design Engineering Show will highlight a variety of manufacturing solutions.

The 2003 National Design Engineering Show, which will be held March 3-6 at Chicago’s McCormick Place Complex as part of National Manufacturing Week, will bring together a host of solutions for today’s challenging design engineering environment. The more than 170,000-square-foot exhibit area will contain approximately 650 exhibiting companies with a wide array of technologies, products and services.

To enable visitors to access all of these exhibits in a timely fashion, the show will be organized into a series of pavilions. These include: Ceramics, sponsored by the American Ceramic Society (ACerS); CAD/Collaborative Product Development; Contract Manufacturing; Motion Technology, sponsored by the Fluid Power Society and Power Transmission Distributors Association; Plastics; and Rapid Prototyping, sponsored by Time-Compression Technologies. In addition, the show will also mark the debut of the Technology Transfer Conference and Expo, which will feature new technologies available for license, as well as companies, government labs and universities that are interested in co-developing industry solutions.

As in previous years, the Ceramics pavilion will bring together a number of ceramic materials and products specifically designed for high-tech applications. For example, Ceradyne will display examples of its silicon nitride industrial wear product line, which is used as cam rollers for valve train applications in heavy-duty diesel engines, as well as in high-pressure common rail fuel pumps and unit fuel injection systems where conventional metal parts fail. The company’s booth will also feature components produced from non-oxide ceramics, such as silicon carbide, aluminum nitride and boron carbide, which are used in an equally wide range of industrial applications.

CoorsTek will showcase its new PlasmaPure™ high-purity, low-sodium alumina, developed for specialized applications in the semiconductor, electronic and optical industries, as well as its high-resistivity PURE silicon carbide and a new process for producing 100% hermetically sealed multi-layer channel components. Rauschert Technical Ceramics will exhibit custom components made from aluminum oxide, cordierite, zirconium oxide, toughened alumina, magnesium oxide, porcelain, steatite, silicon carbide and silicon nitride for a variety of industrial applications; and Saint-Gobain Advanced Ceramics will demonstrate how using its CERBEC® silicon nitride balls in bearings can lower total operating costs.

Several companies allied to the ceramic and related fields will also be present, including Trent, Inc., a manufacturer of electric ovens, electric furnaces, heating elements, heater racks, duct heaters, kettles, electric jackets, melters, conveyor ovens, furnaces and hot plates; and Laserage Technology Corp., a custom laser processing facility with over 35 industrial lasers. Other exhibitors in the Ceramics pavilion will include Astro Met Inc., CeramTec North America, Inc., Du-Co Ceramics Co., Heany Industries, Inc., Refractron Technologies Corp., Rubis Precis, Small Precision Tools Inc., Superior Technical Ceramics Corp. and WECO Electrical Connectors, Inc.*

References:

_{*as of January 6, 2003. This is not a complete list.}

For more information:

For more information, contact Reed Exhibitions, 383 Main Ave., Norwalk, CT 06851; (800) 840-0678 or (203) 840-5678; fax (203) 840-9678; e-mail atinquiry@manufacturingweek.com; or visit http://www.manufacturingweek.com.