Research two contemporary developments in material processing and explain them briefl y.
What will be an ideal response?
Some exciting new developments are occurring in material processing.
One is to process materials into products that require little fi nishing or
postprocessing. An example is casting products with complex geometries
into their fi nal shape. Normally the surfaces of these castings are not
fi nished to perfection and require further heating, smoothing, or
machining. The method, referred to as net shaping, reduces the amount
of materials used by up to 50 percent and saves energy needed in the
production process because the casting is more perfect and does not
require the need for further machining or heating. Another emerging idea is to use microfactories to process materials. These are small, desktop factories that match the size of the production system to the size of the parts being made. They are linked to engineers, suppliers, and customers over the Internet. They can be easily reconfi gured to produce different parts as needed. A fabber is a type of microfactory that builds objects by adding plastic materials layer by layer similar to the way a layer of ink is
printed on to paper.
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