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JACKSON, MN--Farmers never take a day off. Nor do their tractors. Growers rely on their machines to plow, plant, till, spray, bale and harvest a wide variety of crops in all sorts of conditions.

The first major renovation in a home often brings down the wall between the kitchen and living room, creating an open floor plan. It also reveals a direct line of sight from the soft furniture textures of the living space to the hard surfaces of a kitchen.

A variety of in-line surface treatment technologies are available to promote adhesion in thermoset and thermoplastic composites.

Connecting a sensor, such as a thermocouple, to a data acquisition system to obtain accurate measurements involves some forethought.

Ultrasonic welding can handle most plastics assembly applications. Other friction-based processes, such as vibration welding and spin welding, can usually tackle the rest. However, that necessitates investing in three separate machines at considerable cost.

The one constant thing about technology is that it is constantly changing and evolving. Don’t think so? In that case, ask the people who rushed out to buy the latest iteration of a smartphone, but then find themselves standing in line waiting to purchase the latest new-and-improved version just six months later.

Sometimes, when a product has been around for many years, the best way to gain market share in a crowded field is to completely rethink the design.

Most areas of manufacturing have had steady paces of technological innovation over the past 50 years. Material assembly and material joining is one area, however, that has not kept pace.

Robots used to be thought of strictly as stationary machines. They were bolted to a floor, table, ceiling or wall and that’s where they stayed. But, that’s beginning to change.

Manufacturers of complex products, such as engines and transmissions, have long been using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to error-proof their processes, document quality, and deal with high-mix production.