Author: manufacturing.com.de

In a blog last week, I provided a multitude of reasons to apply to be a 2025 Baldrige examiner®. The benefits of serving in this volunteer role were conveyed by three highly experienced Baldrige examiners with career expertise from the business, K-12 education, and health care sectors. Each served as evaluation team leaders both in previous years and in the revamped process launched in 2024. But wait: there are more reasons to apply to be a Baldrige examiner®! Consider what two other highly experienced examiners—this time with backgrounds in higher education and nonprofit and government organizations, respectively—recently conveyed about the value…

Members of the Material Flammability Characterization Project recently presented or co-authored a series papers at the 16th International Conference and Exhibition on fire science and engineering (Interflam 2025, UK), the Flame Retardancy of Polymeric Materials conference (FRPM25, Spain) and the US National Combustion Meeting (Boston, MA).These talks describe new experimental tools and analytical techniques that support both the Material Flammability Characterization and Functional Barriers for Low-Flammability Products projects. These talks highlighted a range of topics including:ASTM E3367: Conception and Development of a New Standard Test based on Cone CalorimetryEvaluating Variability in the Fire Behavior of multiple version of commercially available…

Credit: NIST Today is the day! Digital Identity Guidelines, Revision 4  is finally here…it’s been an exciting journey and NIST is honored to be a part of it. What can we expect?Serving as a culmination of a nearly four-year collaborative process that included foundational research, two public drafts, and about 6,000 individual comments from the public, Revision 4 of Special Publication 800-63, Digital Identity Guidelines, intends to respond to the changing digital landscape that has emerged since the last major revision of this suite, published in 2017. The guidelines presented in Revision 4 explain the process and technical requirements for meeting digital identity…

Credit: iStock/gorodenkoff This blog is the first in a four-part series on the beginner’s guide to Industrial Artificial Intelligence applications.Welcome knowledge seeker! Do you feel dazzled and awed by the great potential of Artificial Intelligence aka AI? Perhaps hesitant or lost when words like ‘convolution,’ ‘deep learning,’ or ‘autoencoder’ are thrown around? Well, fear not, friend, for you have come to just the right place! You don’t need to be a computer wizard or a super genius to understand how using AI can impact your system and, more importantly, if using it is worth the investment.This is a multi-part series…

For the past decade, Taking Measure has told the stories behind the groundbreaking research we do at NIST.  Our goal has been twofold:  Present NIST’s science and research in a way that anyone can understand and appreciate, regardless of their background.  Give our researchers a forum to tell their stories.When Taking Measure launched on Jan. 14, 2016, then-NIST Director Willie May wrote in the inaugural post:  “Through this blog, we’d like to share with you our excitement and passion for the work we do. I hope we can answer some of your questions about science and technology, and about why we do…

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released NIR-SORT 2.0, a major technical expansion of its spectroscopic fabric characterization dataset. This update provides high-fidelity “molecular fingerprints” essential for the development, benchmarking, and validation of classification models used in automated textile identification systems. Near Infrared Spectra of Origin-defined and Real-world Textiles (NIR-SORT) 2.0 is available for download from the NIST Public Data Repository and also through the Materials Data Framework.Open-Source, Machine-Readable DataThe identification of fiber content in collected textiles often relies on Near Infrared (NIR) spectroscopy, a rapid and non-invasive technique that detects chemical bond structures. Because NIR spectra…

Tucker Bryant is a Stanford-educated poet and entrepreneur. He’s also a former employee of technology behemoth Google, where he used his creative perspective to be an innovator. At the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program’s 36th Quest for Excellence® Conference this spring, Bryant will share his unique insights about innovation for the benefit of work in any sector.Following is an exchange I recently had with Bryant as I sought to learn more about his planned keynote presentation for the upcoming Baldrige conference.Let’s start with the obvious: most people probably don’t think of a high-tech business like Google as being an ideal career fit for…

Update: The comment period for your feedback on the second public draft of NIST IR 8259 has been extended through December 10, 2025.Over the past few months, NIST has been revising and updating Foundational Activities for IoT Product Manufacturers (NIST IR 8259 Revision 1 Initial Public Draft), which describes recommended pre-market and post-market activities for manufacturers to develop products that meet their customers’ cybersecurity needs and expectations. Thank you so much for the thoughtful comments and feedback throughout this process; 400+ participants across industry, consumer organizations, academia, federal agencies, and researchers shared feedback in both the December 2024 and March…

Credit: iStock/Sean Anthony Eddy As a manufacturer, you sometimes face technical challenges beyond the scope of your in-house expertise or experience. It is important to focus on finding the right partners and advisors to help you navigate these obstacles and remain competitive.The Mississippi Polymer Institute (MPI), based in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, is one of those resources. MPI is a regional office of the Mississippi Manufacturers Association Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MMA-MEP, Mississippi MEP), which is part of the MEP National NetworkTM. MPI is a non-profit industrial outreach organization housed at the University of Southern Mississippi (as its fight song goes: “Southern Miss…

NIST researcher Jim Cline displays the X-ray diffraction SRM while standing in front of the goniometer used to certify it. Credit: B. Gutierrez/NIST Measurement, in its most basic form, is about comparing the thing you want to measure with a reference. To measure the length of a table, you compare it to a tape measure. To measure flour for a birthday cake, you compare it to a measuring cup. Better references mean better measurements.If you’re baking a cake, it doesn’t matter much if your measuring cup is a little off, but sometimes millions of dollars or even people’s lives depend…