The Timken Co., Canton, Ohio, announces that its board of directors has approved a plan to pursue a separation of the company’s steel business from its bearings and power transmission business through a spinoff, creating two publicly traded companies. A leading global manufacturer of carbon and alloy bar, producing ingot-cast and continuous-cast steel bars for the automotive, bearing, energy and industrial market segments, the separation is designed to improve performance in both companies.
Air Products, Lehigh Valley, Pa., has acquired EPCO Carbon Dioxide Products Inc., a privately-held producer and marketer of liquid carbon dioxide headquartered in Monroe, Louisiana. The acquisition also includes Louisiana Leasing, Ltd. of Illinois, an affiliated company that owns liquid CO2 distribution assets that are solely leased to EPCO.
Olympus, Valley, Pa., released LEXT OLS4100 laser confocal microscope system, designed to deliver nanometer-level imaging, accurate 3D measurement, and outstanding surface roughness analysis. It features auto brightness and a new high-speed stitching mode. Engineered to meet a growing demand for increased measurement precision and wider observation applicability, OLS4100 offers advanced measurement performance at ten-nanometer resolution with a variety of user-friendly performance parameters.
It was a result so unexpected that Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, researchers initially thought it must be a mistake: Under certain conditions, putting a cracked piece of metal under tension-that is, exerting a force that would be expected to pull it apart-has the reverse effect, causing the crack to close and its edges to fuse together. The surprising finding could lead to self-healing materials that repair incipient damage before it has a chance to spread.
Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, Texas, is working on a $1.5 million, three-year project awarded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop novel technologies for depositing thin films. The contract award is under DARPA’s Local Control of Materials Synthesis (LoCo) program, which is investigating non-thermal approaches for depositing thin-film coatings onto the surfaces of a variety of materials.
