Powder Injection Molding (PIM) for Low Cost Manufacturing of Intricate Parts to Net-Shape
Abstract : Powder Injection Molding (PIM) is a low cost manufacturing process that produces very complex parts to net-shape in a wide variety of materials and unique alloys, including superalloys, stainless steels and carbides, resulting in minimal secondary and assembly operations. PIM offers significant cost savings, increased design and materials flexibility, increased possibility of miniaturization, high mechanical properties, good surface finish and high speed production. The activities and expertise in powder metallurgy as well as in process numerical modeling related to powder injection molding at the Industrial Materials Institute of the National Research Council of Canada (NRC-IMI) and at Maetta Sciences, a company that has research and development facilities at the NRC-IMI, will be presented. Selected solutions and examples realized by NRC-IMI and by Maetta Sciences using respectively their high pressure and their scalable PIM platforms will be presented and described. Potential applications for the military, transportation and aerospace sectors will be highlighted.
The Formulation of Titanium - based Metal Feedstocks and the Fabrication of Parts using the Powder Injection Moulding Process
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Do Potential People Have Moral Rights?
By a potential person I shall mean an entity which is not now a person but which is capable of developing into a person, given certain biologically and/or technologically possible conditions. This is admittedly a narrower sense than some would attach to the term ‘potential'. After all, people of the twenty-fifth century, if such there will be, are in some sense potential people now, even though the specific biological entities from which they will develop, i.e. the particular gametes or concepti, do not yet exist. For there do exist, in the reproductive capacities of people now living and in the earth's resources, conditions adequate to produce these future people eventually, provided of course that various possible catastrophes are avoided. Indeed, in some sense of ‘potential’ there have been countless billions of potential people from the beginning of time. But I am concerned not with such remote potentialities but with currently existing entities that are capable of developing into people.