At the beginning of the pandemic, hospitals faced a shortage of respirators and consumers a shortage of common household products and electronics to keep them occupied during the lockdowns.

Since 2010, more than 4,700 companies have brought back some or all of their manufacturing operations and sourcing to the United States. Despite COVID-19, reshoring set a new record in 2020. The job total for 2020 is 109,000 for reshoring and 51,000 for foreign direct investment (FDI), which brings the total to over 1 million U.S. manufacturing jobs added from offshore since 2010.

If an American president signs a climate-change agreement, and everyone is around to see it, does it really make a difference? With an election every four years, the answer is not on the international stage.

Most heat treaters have been told by in-house customers, as well as external customers, that we need to have the component “heat treated without distortion.” That is an impossibility.

Let’s face it, most of our businesses use lots of energy. It’s hard to get around that when we are repeatedly heating large furnaces to higher than 1000°F. Trouble is, energy is expensive.

Spectacular structural collapses sometimes happen due to inadequate strength of the material used to make the structure. But machinery components, subject to stresses from rotational motion and/or vibrations, usually break due to fatigue.

Fortune magazine creates several lists each year, including (of course) the Fortune 500. In their list of the world’s largest companies ranked by revenue, at least 10 automakers show up in the first 84 slots. Volkswagen and Toyota are in the top-10. In their list of the top-50 most-admired companies, Toyota and BMW are in the top-50.

The Advanced Casting Research Center (ACRC) at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) is currently working on several digital-manufacturing projects. In this piece, we feature two material manufacturing research projects with far-reaching impact.

Shortly after taking office, President Biden’s Chief of Staff Ron Klain issued a regulatory-freeze memo across virtually all agencies. The action is typical of an incoming administration, especially one from the opposing party. The move allows the President’s team to review pending rules, 11th-hour actions and permanent regulations drafted by the previous administration.

Welcome to my part of “Technical Talk,” where we will discuss brazing, a very important metal-joining technique that continues to grow in usage each year in many industries around the world. Most people are familiar with welding and soldering, but many are not familiar with where brazing might fit into the overall metals-joining landscape.