For a parent, a child's lopsided art-class ashtray holds a certain charm. But to the manufacturers of ceramic parts for such devices as medical implants and cell phones, lopsidedness means failure. Researchers at Ohio State University have come up with a new recipe for ceramics that can avoid a major cause of malformation.
In conventional ceramics production, organic material is often added to the mix to make shaping easier. But firing the pieces burns off the organics, leaving behind pores. These must be filled in a second firing that can induce nonuniform shrinkage of the part, causing cracks or deformations.
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Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
This document is part of the “How-To Guide for Most Common Measurements” centralized resource portal. This tutorial provides a detailed guide for measurement and device considerations to take temperature measurements using thermocouples. Get an introduction to thermocouples, which are inexpensive sensing devices widely used with PC-based data acquisition systems. Also review some specific thermocouple examples and learn how thermocouples work and ways to integrate them into a data acquisition measurement system.
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