Gone are the days when the impact of products on the environment or human health were optional business concerns. Regulatory constraints on materials and chemicals are increasing, and many companies struggle to respond – and to do so quickly and efficiently. Restrictions on hexavalent chrome are one well-known example. Another is REACH – the European Union regulation concerning the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation & restriction of Chemicals – which applies to products that are either manufactured in, or imported into, the EU. Companies are under obligations to report the use of restricted substances, and to limit or avoid their use.

DMG MORI manufactures a wide variety of conventional chip-cutting and ultrasonic machining centers for OEMs and production job shops serving the aerospace industry. Inherent in this industry are several factors that require great care and planning in the machining process.

In industries such as aerospace, characterized by extreme operating environments that push materials and components to the edge of their design capabilities, companies are challenged to continually seek economically viable ways to maintain and improve performance.

Deployability and life-cycle management of large and disparate collections of weapons, combat and C4ISR computing systems is one of the most critical challenges facing the Department of Defense today. Numerous defense programs, each defining separate, and oftentimes unique system architectures, configurations, and compositions, result in a wide range of processing and control systems that create complexity and drive excessive lifecycle costs.

Laser diodes and laser diode arrays (LDAs) are widely used throughout military systems, for sighting and range finding, but also at high power levels as offensive and defensive weapons. In companion with much higher-power chemical lasers, these high-power optical sources can generate kilowatts of optical power (as arrays) for use in neutralizing incoming missiles, rockets, and armaments and for long-distance offensive strikes. But laser diodes are also still inefficient, and a great deal of the energy supplied to a laser diode or an LDA is converted into heat, which must be safely dissipated to ensure a long operating lifetime for the solid-state devices.

The aerospace sector places some uniquely challenging demands on electronics designers. For a start, the environments that the electronics are exposed to are much harsher than in almost every other scenario. Moreover, the life expectancy of the products is much higher, while the accepted failure rate is easily an order of magnitude lower than typical commercial products.

Seastema SpA, a company owned by Fincantieri (Genova, Italy), designs, develops, and supplies integrated automation systems for different areas of the marine industry. The company established an Innovation Division in Rome to verify the feasibility of an unconventional radar system by means of a demonstrator built as much as possible with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) devices.