Hartford Business Journal

HARTFORDBUSINESS.COM | JANUARY 13, 2025 7 CCAT's Technical Instructor Richard Lawton (shown in center) showcases tooling, machining strategies, and programming automations using model-based definition. HBJ PHOTO | HARRIET JONES Digital Thread CT manufacturers urged to embrace all-digital future, or risk being 'run over' the paper behind. It's very powerful because you can now use that information to automate a lot of your processes downstream." Leadership buy in Reducing errors, cutting costs and saving time. These are the key issues that the new paradigm of digital thread is supposed to solve, by keeping the process fully in the digital world from start to finish. The heaviest push to get legacy machine shops in Connecticut and around the country to adopt this digital paradigm is coming from the government itself. Every branch of the military has been embracing digital thread in its acquisition programs, and urging its contractors to get on board. And this is why class is now in session at CCAT. For the past year, the center has been implementing a $7.1-million grant from the Depart- ment of Defense that has allowed it to build out its Digital Thread Lab and evangelize to companies across the Northeast for this new way of doing business. The lab consists not just of classroom learning, but of technical spaces where engineers can try out the new processes on demonstra- tion machines. The idea is to upskill the defense industrial base to the new, digital standard, and the lab has national application and aspirations. By Harriet Jones hjones@hartfordbusiness.com "I 'm going to apologize in advance — there are a lot of acronyms in this space," said James Brino, addressing a classroom of manufacturing executives and engineers at the Connecticut Center for Advanced Technology in East Hartford. And Brino, a technical trainer and curriculum manager at CCAT's Digital Thread Lab, is not kidding. He was overseeing a lesson about MBD — model-based definition, which is the basis of a digital revolution that some manufacturers are beginning to embrace — with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Complex feats of engineering, like building a jet engine, obviously use lots of digital tools. Parts are initially visualized using computer-aided design or CAD programs. They're often then physically created on advanced machine tools like CNC (computer numerical control) machines, or via additive manufac- turing on so-called 3D printers. But in between all these digital processes, there's still a lot of paper. The engineer at an original equip- ment manufacturer (OEM) like East Hartford jet-engine maker Pratt & Whitney may design a part in a CAD program, but they'll then send a 2D drawing of the part to the machine shops in their supply chain. The experienced machinists there must use those 2D renderings to figure out how to program the machine tool that will make the part. It can take many hours to translate what's on the page into commands for the machine tool, and it also can occasionally require clarification. When Brino asks the assembled engineers in the classroom if they've ever had to request additional infor- mation on a drawing, or queried an error, a lot of hands shoot up. In a digital thread world, the CAD program would render the newly designed part in a fully digital file. This MBD representation allows the manufacturing technician to rotate the drawing in 3D space to under- stand and visualize the part, and, crucially, also fully encodes all the measurements and other data asso- ciated with the design. Because all of this information can be read from the model file by the machine tools, it can fully auto- mate the programming — cutting the preparation time from hours to minutes. No more painstaking manual data entry from a 2D drawing. "We're going from everything being paper based — from 2D prints of objects and parts — to this 3D representation and models," said Amy Thompson, CCAT's chief talent and training officer. "Once you have that model, you can really leave Amy Thompson Continued on next page

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