We’ve covered SKF in medical, wind turbine, hand tool, solar panel, and compressor applications. We’ve examined SKF bearings utilized in crazy, out-of-this-world, aerospace applications. Nothing, however, tops the seal of approval coming from a professional skater in Europe.

The following article looks at the latest news on servo motors, drives and motors. How do we differentiate between the definitions? What can design engineers find between a stepper and a servo motor? Also, a quick update this summer on the benefits of closed-loop motor control. 

Print is not dead. While reading magazines cover-to-cover is a lost art—thanks to work responsibilities, 24-hour sports/entertainment coverage, and the universal time suck known as Instagram—someone, somewhere still prefers the printed word to the shiny, unfriendly artificial light of tablets and smartphones.  This publication (hopefully) provides information engineers can discuss, debate, or collaborate on for future manufacturing endeavors. There would be no words, no photographs, no advertising without the paper used to print this very magazine.

The engineering community is fascinated with big, shiny, yellow machines. Walk into any manufacturing facility around the globe and you’ll find guests huddled around the biggest, loudest, and most intimidating equipment on the shop floor. These large machines must play by the same rules as everybody else—they need to reduce energy consumption, lower plant costs, and increase productivity. Many power transmission component suppliers are tasked with optimizing this equipment. 

SKF recently launched SKF Axios, a solution that reinvents the fields of industrial machine reliability and predictive maintenance based on a collaboration between SKF and Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS). SKF showcased Axios during Hannover Messe 2022.

How do gearbox and gear drive providers navigate the interesting challenges found in steel, cement, paper, and construction applications? Apparently, one application at a time. Thanks to condition monitoring technology, IoT solutions and the flexibility of engineering teams today, plant downtime is not as problematic as it has been in the past. The secret to success in heavy industrial markets comes down to staying ahead of component failures.  

This exclusive round-up article from PTE examines the latest news and product technology involving smart bearings, motors and drives. 

With Sinumerik One, the first digital native CNC for machine tools, Siemens works with software to create the machine controller and the associated Digital Twin from one engineering system seamlessly. The latest iteration of the CNC system was on display recently at Automate 2022 in Detroit where machine tool builders and CNC users were able to witness the product, production, and performance benefits on the show floor.