MHI, formerly known as the Material Handling Institute, is forecasting that orders for new materials handling equipment are expected to grow between five and six percent in 2013. MHI expects 2014 to exhibit even stronger growth, and projects an increase in sales of 10 percent or more.

This comes after a strong 2012 when materials handling equipment new orders grew 7.2 percent.

“As the current US economic expansion shifts from capital expenditure-driven to consumer-led, we anticipate modest, positive materials handling equipment manufacturing (MHEM) growth for 2013. Housing, automotive rebounds and expansion in industrial, warehouse and commercial buildings (over 69 percent between 2014 and 2018) will contribute substantially to improved MHEM growth for 2014 and beyond,” says Hal Vandiver, MHI executive consultant.

Shipments of materials handling equipment were also up last year. They increased 9.8 percent from 2011 and MHI predicts they will continue to rise. The Charlotte, North Carolina association forecasts a growth rate of 3.5 percent in 2013 followed by a 9.1 percent increase in 2014.

US domestic demand (shipments plus imports less exports) grew 10.9 percent in 2012 and is estimated to grow 3.4 percent in 2013 and just over 9.5 percent in 2014.

Despite the positive outlook, there were a few statistics that showed signs of weakness. MHEM trade growth slowed by more than 50 percent in 2012. US import growth in 2012 was 19.9 percent lower than the 2011 figure. US export growth was was 11.2 percent in 2012, down from 26.2 percent in 2011. MHEM imports and exports are expected to slow dramatically in 2013 and rebound modestly beginning mid-2014.

All figures come from MHI’s latest Material Handling Equipment Manufacturing (MHEM) Forecast, which is produced every quarter.

Molson Coors introduced its 16 oz. aluminum bottle with a trio of tasty brews: Molson Canadian,  Coors Light, and Coors Light Iced T, receiving the 2013 Gold Award in the rigid packaging category, recognized for its technical, graphic and sustainability achievements.

The Canadian Packaging Consumer’s Voice Award is one of five best of show awards and represents the interests of shoppers. The Molson Coors aluminum bottle was selected for its eye-catching graphics, recyclability and the convenience of the bottle’s wide mouth and resealable closure.

PAC has sponsored packaging competitions since 1953. In 2008, PAC held the inaugural Sustainable Packaging Competition which combined with the PAC Packaging Competition to become the PAC Leadership Awards.

Canadian Packaging magazine has been serving the packaging community in Canada since 1947.

Ball introduced its Alumi-Tek bottle in 2008, which combines the sustainability and versatility of a can with the convenience of a bottle.

Headquartered in Broomfield, Co., Ball Corporation is a supplier of high quality packaging for beverage, food and household products customers, and of aerospace and other technologies and services, primarily for the U.S. government. Ball Corporation and its subsidiaries employ approximately 15,000 people worldwide and reported 2012 sales of more than $8.7 billion.

For the latest Ball news and for other company information, visit www.ball.com.

For more information about the PAC Leadership Awards, visit www.pac.ca.

Bolden checked on the progress a month after the Obama administration unveiled its 2014 budget that proposes $105 million to jumpstart the mission, which may eventually cost more than $2.6 billion.

Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and Glenn Research Center in Ohio are developing a thruster that relies on ion propulsion instead of conventional chemical fuel.

Once relegated to science fiction, ion propulsion—which fires beams of electrically charged atoms to propel a spacecraft—is preferred for deep space cruising because it’s more fuel-efficient. Engine testing is expected to ramp up next year.

During Thursday’s visit to the JPL campus, nestled in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains northeast of Los Angeles, Bolden viewed an engineering model of the engine and peered through a porthole of a vacuum chamber housing the prototype.

NASA is under White House orders to fly humans to an asteroid as a stepping stone to Mars. Instead of sending astronauts all the way to an asteroid, as originally planned, the space agency came up with a quicker, cheaper idea: Haul the asteroid close to the moon and visit it there.

The space agency would launch an ion-powered unmanned spacecraft to snare a yet-to-be-selected small asteroid in 2019 and park it in the moon’s neighbourhood. Then a spacewalking team would hop on an Orion space capsule that’s currently under development and explore the rock in 2021.

The Movitec line allows KSB to expand in the commodity pump market. The company—part of the Germany-based KSB Group—is better known for its large, custom-made products and engineered solutions for power plants, mining, wastewater treatment and industrial processing.

But customers were also asking for off-the-shelf smaller pumps, according to KSB.

The Movitec pumps provide an “off-the-shelf, cost-effective solution for mid-capacity, high pressure transfer and booster applications,” said Mike Blundell, president and CEO of KSB Canada, who spoke at the launch.

Seal variants are rated for temperatures from -30 to 140 degrees Celsius, allowing them to handle a range of media including water, alcohol, vegetable oils, petroleum products and liquid natural gas. The pumps will be distributed across Canada.

KSB custom pumps are manufactured in Germany, then fitted with Canadian-supplied motors at the Mississauga plant. The location is also used for refurbishing and servicing large pump models that can’t be maintained in the field.

Randolphe Froude (Photo courtesy of Harting Canada Inc.)

Randolph Froude, who has an engineering background, formerly worked with a machine builder.

The appointment is billed by Harting as the second stage in establishing more of a presence in the Canadian industrial connectors market. The company opened a national sales office in Montreal in 2011, and named a new Canadian CEO earlier this year.

“Randolph’s appointment continues the process of establishing a personal relationship between Harting and our Canadian customers, and building what has been a very successful launch for Harting Canada,” said Jon DeSouza, president and CEO of Harting Inc. of North America and Harting Canada Inc.

The Harting Technology Group, family owned and based in Germany, employs approximately 3,500 people globally across more than 40 subsidiaries and branch offices. With production facilities in Europe, Asia and the US, the company produces connectors for industrial, telecom and energy applications.

In the eight years since the BrandZ report was first published in 2006, Toyota was crowned brand value leader in the automotive sector six times, and second on two separate occasions.

The rankings this year are as follows:

1. Toyota. Value: $24,497 M. Change, year over year: +12%
2. BMW. Value: $24,015 M. Change, year over year: -2%
3. Mercedes-Benz. Value: $17,952 M. Change, year over year: +11%
4. Honda. Value: $12,401 M. Change, year over year: -2%
5. Nissan. Value: $10,186 M. Change, year over year: +3%
6. Volkswagen. Value: $8,790 M. Change, year over year: +3%
7. Ford. Value: $7,556 M. Change, year over year: +8%
8. Audi. Value: $5,545 M. Change, year over year: +18%
9. Hyundai. Value: $4,000 M. Change, year over year: +11%
10. Lexus. Value: $24,015 M. Change, year over year: +2%

Developed for WPP’s operating companies by Millward Brown Optimor, the BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands ranking is now in its eighth year. It is the only study to combine measures of brand equity based on interviews with over two million consumers globally about thousands of global ‘consumer facing’ and business-to-business brands with a rigorous analysis of the financial and business performance of each company (using data from Bloomberg and Kantar Worldpanel) to separate the value that brand plays in driving business revenue and market capitalization.

Consumer perception of a brand is a key input in determining brand value because brands are a combination of business performance, product delivery, clarity of positioning, and leadership. The ranking takes into account regional variations since, even for truly global brands, measures of brand contribution might differ substantially across countries.

But this year, his company, Reverie, began making some of its beds entirely in a factory in New York. Shipping costs from Taiwan have soared between 50 per cent and 60 per cent since the company was founded.

“Shipping costs are tremendous,” he says. “I could put that money into the manufacturing side in the U.S.”

Reverie is one of a growing number of small businesses that are chipping away at the decades-old trend of manufacturing overseas. They’re doing what’s known as reshoring, moving production back to U.S. factories as labour costs grow in countries like China and India and shipping also becomes more expensive. Over the last 20 years, the price of a barrel of oil has risen to about $95 from $20.

There are other issues encouraging the shift. Owners are tired of having to wait weeks for shipments on slow-moving container ships, and they want to get products to customers faster. Some newer businesses aren’t even considering overseas manufacturing. It’s not just small businesses. Some of the largest companies in the U.S. are also joining the trend. Apple Inc. and Caterpillar Inc. are among the manufacturers planning to bring production back to the U.S.

Reverie has had the bases of its beds made in Taiwan since the company was founded. Rawls-Meehan and a business partner in Taiwan agreed that the cost savings and proximity to many customers were good reasons to manufacture there.

“The mentality was that products were going to be manufactured more cheaply in Asia than in the U.S.,” Rawls-Meehan says.

But shipping costs have risen to as much as 20 per cent of the wholesale cost of a bed made in Asia. In 2004, it was just 10 per cent on some of Reverie’s products. So the company is now making a new line of upscale beds in Silver Creek, NY, near Buffalo. Shipping on those beds accounts for no more than five per cent of the wholesale price. That offsets the higher cost of labour in this country.

Rawls-Meehan is considering moving more of his manufacturing to the U.S., but because the company also sells beds to Asia and Australia, he says it likely will always have overseas production.

A good deal of U.S. manufacturing shifted to foreign shores in the 1990s and early 2000s. Workers in China, India and other countries earned far less than workers in U.S. factories. That lowered costs substantially for U.S. companies. Between 1997 and 2008, the U.S. lost nearly 4.5 million manufacturing jobs, according to the Census Bureau. And the amount of overseas manufacturing by U.S. companies grew 141 per cent between 1997 and 2010, according to the government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis.

But the growing middle class in countries such as China and India have been demanding and getting higher wages. In Asia, labour costs are rising 20 per cent a year, compared to three per cent in the U.S., says David Simchi-Levi, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose specialties include supply chain management.

A weaker dollar has also made foreign-made goods more expensive. A study by the consulting firm AlixPartners predicts that the costs of manufacturing in the U.S. and China on average would be equal in 2015. For products including disposable packaging and some metal parts, costs are already equal or less when they’re made in the U.S., the study found.

Reshoring began picking up momentum in 2010 after the recession and as the dollar began to lose value, says Lisa Ellram, a professor at Miami University of Ohio who specializes in supply chain management. Businesses that were unsure how strong their sales would be in a weak economy didn’t want to make as many commitments to far-flung factories.

“They really just didn’t have as much certainty about their volume and their needs, so it was maybe a little bit easier to deal with somebody closer,” she says.

Innovations in manufacturing in the U.S. are encouraging the shift. Many U.S. companies use robots and highly specialized processes that allow them to make custom components for the automotive and aerospace industries.

“Instead of hiring people, we’re using robots,” Ellram says. Chinese companies are also using robots, but U.S. manufacturers are ahead of them, she says.

The government doesn’t have figures tracking how much manufacturing companies are bringing back the U.S., according to Jeannine Aversa, a spokeswoman with the Bureau of Economic Analysis. About 50,000 manufacturing jobs came back to the U.S. between 2010 and 2012, many of them in factories that turn out electrical equipment and components and metal parts, according to the Reshoring Initiative, a non-profit group that advocates moving manufacturing back to the U.S.

The trend could gain momentum because demand for U.S. goods is growing. Ninety-five per cent of manufacturers surveyed last year said they are increasing their purchases from domestic companies, or keeping them at the same level as 2011, according to ThomasNet, a company that operates an online marketplace where businesses can connect with manufacturers, distributors and service companies.

The amount of time it takes to get goods made overseas is another reason manufacturing is coming back to the U.S. It’s taking longer to ship finished products because cargo ships have lowered their speed by 20 per cent to conserve fuel, Ellram says. That reduction adds four or five days to a container ship trip from China, she says. It takes two weeks or more for a ship to travel from China to the U.S., depending on which ports it departs from and where it makes its deliveries.

Shipping times matter for companies that need to get their goods to market quickly. Now that Cotton Babies, a manufacturer and retailer of baby merchandise, has moved manufacturing of its cotton diapers to Denver from Egypt, it has cut in half the time it takes to get them to market, says CEO Jennifer Labit.

Product development can be slowed by the distance between designers in the U.S. and manufacturers in other countries, Labit says. Communication takes longer and expensive overseas trips are often necessary to make sure that the products are being made to specifications.

Quality, and the ability to fix problems faster, gives small domestic manufacturers an advantage over foreign companies, Ellram says.

“Those are the things that (domestic) small businesses can use as a selling point,” she says.

A myriad of problems helped Reading Truck Body decide to bring manufacturing of truck parts back to the U.S. from China.

Shipments were disorganized. The company didn’t know until it opened containers which parts had been shipped. That meant it couldn’t be sure ahead of time which of its truck bodies could be finished and sold, national sales director Craig Bonham says. Reading, based in Reading, Pa., also was concerned about the amount of time it took to get shipments.

“It spans about three months from purchase order to the time you get products to North American shores,” Bonham says. “That timeline did not allow us to become reactionary to market demands.”

Reading lost some sales because it didn’t have the parts to finish a truck a customer wanted. But the impact of unpredictable shipments went beyond lost revenue—it also led to chaos on the production line and frustration among the company’s managers.

“You feel a larger sense of dependency when you’re relying on someone that far away,” Bonham says. The company received its last shipment from Asia in December.

It also dealt with high expenses to send two employees to China each quarter, at a cost of $100,000 a year.

But with production now entirely in the U.S., the company is more confident.

“We have more control of our destiny,” he says.

©The Canadian Press

It’s the latest advance from the booming field of regenerative medicine, making body parts in the lab.

In the case of Kaiba Gionfriddo, doctors didn’t have a moment to spare. Because of a birth defect, the little Ohio boy’s airway kept collapsing, causing his breathing to stop and often his heart, too. Doctors in Michigan had been researching artificial airway splints but had not implanted one in a patient yet.

In a single day they made 100 tiny tubes, using computer-guided lasers to stack and fuse thin layers of plastic instead of paper and ink to form various shapes and sizes. The next day, with special permission from the Food and Drug Administration, they implanted one of these tubes in Kaiba, the first time this has been done.

Suddenly, a baby that doctors had said would probably not leave the hospital alive could breathe normally for the first time. He was three months old when the operation was done last year and is nearly 19 months old now. He is about to have his tracheotomy tube removed; it was placed when he was a couple months old and needed a breathing machine. And he has not had a single breathing crisis since the operation.

Independent experts praised the work and the potential for 3-D printing to create more body parts to solve unmet medical needs.

Kaiba had the operation on Feb. 9, 2012. The splint was placed around his defective bronchus, which was stitched to the splint to keep it from collapsing. The splint was manufactured a slit along its length so it can expand and grow as the child does—something a permanent, artificial implant could not do.

The VZWF valve is a force pilot operated solenoid valve that can be used with water, air and neutral media. This new valves utilize small solenoids to control high pressures with large nominal diameters. The units can switch at pressures as low as 0 bar and close automatically in the case of a pressure loss in the circuit. These valves can be applied in closed media circuits.

The VZWF series is generally suitable for applications in which the medium can be vented downstream of the valve into the atmosphere or a tank. The valves are used for gaseous and liquid material flows up to a viscosity of maximum 22 mm²/s. Actuation is supported by the pressure of the medium, a special feature of the VZWF. Smaller coils can be used because of lower power requirements to open the valve – the energy of the medium contributes to opening.

Applications for the VZWF valve include: filling systems (secondary circuit), water treatment, pipeline construction, steam boiler construction, liquid gas installations, hot water applications, heating circuits, power plant systems, petrochemical industry, pump systems, storage tank installations, and pneumatic automation systems.

For more information on all Festo products, visit www.festo.com.

In Windvision 2025: A Strategy for Alberta, Canwea suggests setting a ‘Clean Energy Standard’ that puts a cap on the allowable amount of emissions from the province’s energy producers are. It also recommends increasing the $15-per-tonne carbon tax imposed on heavy emitters.

“Neither of these policy measures alone will totally address the challenges facing wind energy in the province, but they are very complementary,” said Robert Hornung, president of Canwea.

“A Clean Electricity Standard will incent long-term contracts for electricity and help provide the long-term revenue certainly needed to finance new projects. An uplift in the carbon price will increase the value of greenhouse gas offsets produced by wind energy projects, providing an additional revenue stream that will improve project economics.”

Canwea estimates the province has about 5,000 megawatts (MW) of easily accessible wind resources. In 2012, wind energy accounted for 3.4 per cent of the province’s energy supply. According to the report, every 150-MW wind farm would:

- reduce Alberta’s GHG emissions by 300,000 tonnes a year;
- represent $316 million in investment
- create 140 full-time equivalent construction jobs and 10 permanent jobs in operations and management
- provide $17 million in lease payments to landowners over 20 years
- generate $31 million of property tax revenue for municipalities

The province’s oil and gas industry could stand to benefit from wind energy as well by using wind as a clean source of power for their operations—something that may help improve the industry’s global reputation, the report adds.

AXION International Holdings, based in New Providence, N.J., says it has received a purchase order from the city for an undisclosed number of the company’s 100 per cent recylced plastic ECOTRAX rail ties.

The composite ties will be used at crossings where the LRT tracks intersect with roads.

According to AXION, Edmonton becomes the third major Canadian city to install its ECOTRAX product.

The composite rail ties will not rot or absorb moisture, the company says, and they are impervious to insect infestation.

They are also safe from salt and freeze-thaw damage that typically plagues traditional wooden rail ties.

AXION says the purchase order from Edmonton will divert more than 150,000 pounds of plastic from the landfill stream.

The investments will support small- and medium-sized businesses in areas ranging from ocean technology and natural resources to life sciences and advanced manufacturing. RDC’s investment is more than $1.8 million in the 12 R&D projects and the total project costs are more than $4.9 million, co-funded by the participating companies and other partner organizations.

The RDC is a provincial crown corporation responsible for improving Newfoundland and Labrador’s research and development performance. RDC works with research and development stakeholders including business, academia and government agencies and departments to make strategic research and development related investments in people, research opportunities and infrastructure.

Some of the projects include:

ExtremeOcean Innovation Inc.
ExtremeOcean Innovation Inc. is a marine technology start-up company formed in 2010 and located in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. The aim of this project is to advance the development of a unique vessel for accessing offshore wind turbines known as the TranSPAR Craft (TranSPAR). The TranSPAR is a propelled spar marine vehicle. It was created due to a need defined by a consortium of energy companies through the UK-based Carbon Trust’s Offshore Wind Accelerator Access global design competition. RDC’s investment is $250,000 of a total project cost of $607,300.

eSonar Inc.
Based in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, eSonar Inc. was incorporated in 2008 to service, develop, manufacture and market electronic and acoustic products for the marine and ocean technology markets. eSonar Inc. is using RDC funding to develop an integrated purse seining system that will transmit data to aid in the launching and retrieving of a purse seine to improve the purse seine fishing market by providing vessel captains with a monitoring system for launching and retrieving the seines. RDC’s investment is $250,000 of a total project cost of $445,713.

Kraken Sonar Systems Inc.

Kraken Sonar Systems Inc. is based in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador as a developer, manufacturer and marketer of sonar devices for the deep sea commercial fisheries, defence and ocean sciences sectors. Through this project, the company has developed a program to create a bathymetric synthetic aperture scanning sonar product. This product would be deployed on unmanned underwater vehicles, as well as untethered and tethered towed bodies/equipment and could capture a higher resolution than the most advanced side scan sonars. DC and NSERC funding will enable the company to hire Dr. Jeremy Dillon as an industrial R&D fellow for two years. Dr. Dillon is a PhD graduate from Memorial University’s Department of Physics and Physical Oceanography, Faculty of Science. RDC’s investment is $60,000 of a total project cost of $155,000.

Click here for to view all the projects receiving RDC funding.

Under the amended and restated JDA, CO₂ Solutions’ proprietary enzymatic method to capture of carbon dioxide from power plants, oil production operations and other large sources of emissions will continue to use Codexis’ directed enzyme evolution technology and enzyme production capabilities.

CO₂ Solutions’ technology uses the natural enzyme, carbonic anhydrase, to enhance the efficiency of CO₂ capture from industrial emission sources, at lower cost than conventional carbon capture technology. Codexis’ technology has dramatically improved this enzyme’s ability to function in harsh industrial conditions. Codexis’ carbonic anhydrase is now suitable for pilot and demonstration testing in CO₂ Solutions’ carbon capture projects.  Carbonic anhydrase is found in humans and other living organisms and is critical in the efficient management of CO₂ during respiration.

Codexis, Inc, based in Redwood City, CA, engineers enzymes for pharmaceutical, biofuel and chemical production.

CO₂Solutions Inc. was founded in 1997 in Quebec City. The develops technology to reduce carbondioxide (CO₂) using the enzyme carbonic anhydrase.

But attention isn’t anything new for Walmart. The project that earned Buna his nomination entered the media spotlight when the retailer introduced its supercube transport trailer to the public.

The supercube is a longer, lower trailer which can carry 30 percent more cargo. It’s mated to a cab-over-engine (COE) tractor with a dromedary (aka drome) box behind it. The drome holds four pallets, (about 10 percent of a trailer load) meaning the combined unit can haul 40 percent more cargo in one trip.

While longer trailers aren’t anything new—LCVs (long combination vehicles) are on the roads in a number of provinces—the combination of the longer trailer, which measures 18.4m (60ft, 6in), and the shorter tractor means the full rig is the same length as a standard tractor-trailer.

Michael Buna, Walmart Canada

“It’s not just a 60ft, 6in trailer,” says Buna. “There’s more to it than just that. We have LED lighting in it. We have low-friction tires. We have an aerodynamic drag system put on it with skirting and cab fairings. The hydraulic system that raises this trailer to bring it up to loading-dock height means we don’t need to have our vendors or our stores modify their loading-dock height to be able to work with this. It’s quite a tricked out set of wheels.”

Mississauga, Ontario-based Innovative Trailer Design (ITD) designed the hydraulic system that raises the trailer to dock height, the sliding drome box—which permits the tractor’s storage unit to move directly against the dock during loading and unloading operations—and the trailer itself. Walmart also worked with Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation (MTO).

The project began in March 2012, when Buna devised the concept. By November 2012, the company had MTO approval to run a pilot project and had the trailers and one truck ready to roll.

When the company unveiled the new trailer and the modified tractor (a 2003 model purchased used, since COE tractors are no longer manufactured in North America), the new design caught the attention of the trucking industry and the worldwide media.

Some of that attention, however, was less than positive. Representatives of the trucking industry in Ontario expressed concerns about how the pilot project was going to operate. Walmart owns the trailers, which it purchased from ITD, but the truck hauling them is owned by one of the company’s transportation partners.

“I guess there was a misunderstanding that Walmart was the one actually handling the trailer. We don’t actually own any tractors. We don’t have our own private fleet in Canada. Everything we do is through a third party. I think it was more of a misunderstanding that Walmart was actually going to be operating this equipment, when a third-party carrier would be operating this equipment and they would be the ones that would be held permitted with the equipment and be reporting into the MTO. If you’re asking me what was the biggest hurdle, that was it: channels of communication.”

The pilot, which allows the supercube to travel between the regional DC in Mississauga and a test store in Belleville, approximately 200km away, is expected to run for one year. “Our goal is to get it put into regulation. And not have it on a permit program.”

Buna’s other goal is to expand the program outside Ontario. Walmart has already entered into discussions with other provinces. In particular, Buna said the company would like to use them at the Calgary, Alberta distribution centre.

For complete MM&D coverage of the Walmart Supercube story click here.

FROM THE MM&D PRINT EDITION

KBR is a global engineering, construction and services company supporting the energy, hydrocarbon, power, industrial, civil infrastructure, minerals, government services and commercial markets.

The company said the purpose of the project is to process shale gas produced from British Columbia’s North Montney region into LNG that is suitable for export. The contract calls for FEED and early detailed engineering work for a two-train LNG plant with a yearly capacity of 12 million tons and associated shipping facilities. Associated facilities include utilities, storage, loading, ship berthing and personnel accommodation facilities.

“We’re pleased to play an important role in this world-scale facility,” said Mitch Dauzat, president of KBR gas monetization. “This award is further indication of KBR’s position as a leading provider of gas monetization solutions for our clients around the world. We look forward to working with Pacific NorthWest and our partner JGC Corporation on this historic LNG export facility.”

NASA issued a US$125,000 grant under its Small Business Innovation Research program to Systems & Materials Research Corporation (SMRC) to build a prototype of a 3-D food printing system.

One of the issues for a mission to Mars is having enough food for the trip.

In an article on Quartz.com, Anjan Contractor, a mechanical engineer at SMRC, explains that food needs to have at least a 15-year shelf life for long-distance space travel.

“The way we are working on it is, all the carbs, proteins and macro and micro nutrients are in powder form,” he tells Quartz. “We take moisture out, and in that form it will last maybe 30 years.”

The article says that pizza is an obvious candidate for 3-D printing because it can be printed in distinct layers. This way it only requires the print head to extrude one substance at a time.

Contractor’s “pizza printer” is still at the conceptual stage, and he will begin building it within two weeks.

It works by first “printing” a layer of dough, which is baked at the same time it’s printed by a heated plate at the bottom of the printer. Then it lays down a tomato base, “which is also stored in a powdered form, and then mixed with water and oil,” Contractor tells Quartz.com.

ABCNews.com reports that NASA is actually still in negotiations with SMRC.

Allard Beutel, a NASA spokesperson, did tell ABCNews.com that as the space agency looks into venturing further into space “we will need to make transformation improvements in our life support systems, including how we feed our astronauts during long, deep space missions.”

Beutel went onto explain that SMRC’s 3-D food printing system has “merits in addressing NASA’s advanced food system technology needs as we prepare for long duration human space exploration. In-space and additive manufacturing offers the potential for game-changing weight savings and new mission opportunities, whether ‘printing’ food, tools or entire spacecraft.”

Photo from NASA.gov

NDE stands for non-destructive evaluation—and includes techniques such as ultrasonic testing, radiography and thermography. NDT is a crucial part of quality and maintenance found in many industry sectors, including the nuclear utility, oil and gas, petrochemical, manufacturing, aerospace and construction sectors.

“Against that backdrop, Canada faces a shortage everywhere. We need to pay more attention at all levels: federally, provincially and at the owner/operator level to know whether or not we’re doing the right things to attract more people to this important occupation,” says Larry Cote, president and CEO of CINDE. “The anecdotal evidence to date suggests we’re not because all industry sectors are hollering for people.”

Much of the current workforce is nearing retirement and the existing hiring climate has created a Catch-22 where many employers won’t consider job applicants without some level of NDT certification from the Canadian General Standards Board (CGSB).

Obtaining certification, however, requires on-the-job experience, according to Trends in NDT Certification and Training in Canada, a report written in 2011 by Cote, P.K. Yuen, the manager of Natural Resource Canada’s Non-Destructive-Testing Certification Body, and John Zirnhelt, a senior engineer from Ponteca Inc.

“It’s the employers and owner/operators that need to step up, not just the certification body and training organizations,” says Cote, pleading: “If you’re in an industry with high demand and a reasonable profit margin, please invest in the training and development of a competent workforce.”

Cote notes some employers that do offer entry-level positions feel frustrated when employees don’t stick around after obtaining enough work experience to get certified.

However, this problem could be minimized if more companies offered entry-level jobs to new graduates.

In early May, Cote attended a meeting of the CGSB 48/2 Committee that sets the national standard for the qualification and certification of NDT personnel in Canada. Based on numbers from the NRCan NDT CB, the committee estimates there are about 5,200 CGSB-certified professionals in Canada—not enough to keep pace with the demand based on feedback from some committee members, he notes.

The lack of certified personnel has current NDT inspectors working lots of overtime, Cote says, and there is general agreement that employee burn-out is increasingly an issue.

It appears to be a worldwide problem, according to research firm Frost & Sullivan, based in Mountain View, Calif.

“What is happening in the industry is that there are qualified NDT technicians coming out of the training institutes. However, they do not possess the necessary skill-set or experience to perform high-quality inspection jobs,” says Nikhil Jain, an analyst with the firm.

“The skills shortage are related to knowing how to perform the inspection and how to interpret and analyze the data collected, and a lot of it comes down to experience,” he notes.

Cote agrees gaining field experience is crucial to reliable inspections. It’s often a physically and mentally demanding job, and inexperienced NDT inspectors are more likely to miss a serious defect in a new part or flaw in a piece of equipment nearing the end of its life. The potential consequences of a missed or wrong inspection could be catastrophic to safety, the environment and the financial bottom-line.

Even experienced operators are more likely to make errors if they’re overworked and mentally fatigued, he says.

Another factor contributing to the skills shortage is the amount and type of training available from colleges, industry organizations, private career colleges and employers.

Cote’s report cites an increase in self-guided, computer- and Internet-based education that is eroding the most effective way of learning NDT techniques: hands-on, classroom-based, training at organizations that deliver practical labs for students along with their academic lectures.

Graduates may not be receiving their education in a way that best prepares them for NDT certification exams and the workforce, he explains.

But as the continued reluctance of employers to hire and train less experienced inspectors continues, finding a way to get critical hands-on experience may be tougher than doing the job itself.

The revamped interface also provides new navigational aids and formatting controls which make it easier to rearrange data.

The software suite from HighJump Software also has enhancements to its lot tracing functions, including new reporting tools that offer greater visibility to inventories during product recalls, and features that make it easier to process returns accurately.

Also part of the suite is an expanded portfolio of configurable voice solutions, including distribution voice-enabled workflow for areas such as picking, receiving and replenishment.

While the system has been configured to run on Windows 64-bit servers and thereby handle larger amounts of data better than previous versions, the Minneapolis, Minnesota-based company says it has also performed the engineering required to reduce the bandwidth demands the software places on the server by up to 75 percent.

Other code enhancements means that now users can access the software with any web browser, and not just Internet Explorer.