IMTS 2012 – on track to be larger than ever

The 29th edition of IMTS – the International Manufacturing Technology Show – is on track to rank among the top five largest IMTS events covering almost 1.2 million net square feet of exhibition space with more than 1,800 exhibiting companies.

The show will be held at Chicago's McCormick Place from 10-15 September 2012 and will host 85,000 - 90,000 manufacturing industry professionals from more than 119 countries in attendance to see more than 15,000 new machine tools, controls, computers, software, components, systems and processes that can improve their efficiency. They will also gain valuable ideas and insight from the world's leading equipment producers.

To feed the hunger for education in the industry, IMTS is responding with an increased offering of educational opportunities offered in conjunction with the show. “It's ironic because in the early years IMTS was actually an educational event and only turned into a buying/selling forum after World War Two,” explained IMTS' vice president, exhibitions and communications, Peter Eelman.

Running concurrently with the show will be seven conference programs: the IMTS 2012 Conference (September 10-14) will focus on five topic tracks with 72 industry specific sessions. Conference topics and presentations will examine materials, manufacturing technology, alternative manufacturing processes, quality/metrology and plant operations.

Complementing this will be number of other conference programs addressing pertinent issues such as automation, enterprise asset management, process optimisation, energy management, sustainability manufacturing and health and safety.

To help guide visitors around the more than 1,300 exhibits and find their areas of interest quickly and easily, IMTS is organised into 10 pavilions: Abrasive Machining/Sawing/Finishing; Controls and CAD/CAM; EDM; Gear Generation; Industrial Automation North America; Machine Components/Cleaning/Environmental; Metal Cutting; Metal Forming & Fabricating/Laser; Quality Assurance; and Tooling & Workholding.

The Emerging Technology Centre (ETC) will have the biggest feature yet – a Local Motors Rally Fighter car, built live right on the show floor, as part of the Collaborative Manufacturing section of the ETC. Local Motors is the first disruptive US automaker to enter the market in decades and is built on the principle of collaborative manufacturing. The designs for its cars come from an open source design community.

There will be three other prominent features in the ETC: Additive Manufacturing; MTConnect, the open source communications and interconnectivity standard for manufacturing equipment and devices; and MTInsight the game changing, customised manufacturing business intelligence system.

Additive Manufacturing section will feature the latest advances in this innovative manufacturing concept. These technologies actually ‘compress time' because they dramatically reduce the time between design and production and eliminate certain processes associated with traditional machining, such as tooling.

MTConnect will return to the ETC in 2012. First introduced at IMTS 2008, the interconnectivity and communications standard is said to be changing the way manufacturing equipment and devices are monitored and their productivity analysed. The standard has been gaining widespread use throughout the industry because it allows equipment and devices to speak a common language.

MTInsight is a business intelligence tool tailored to the manufacturing industry. With a growing cache of apps, MTInsight has the potential to bring manufacturing business leaders data and insight never before possible. ETC visitors can try out the MTInsight demo and learn more about the important data it has to offer.

Since its debut at IMTS 2008, the Advanced Manufacturing Centre has brought a wealth of technological eye candy to the show floor at McCormick Place. The AMC at IMTS 2012 will be no different, this time featuring a Boeing Fuel Cell Demonstrator Aircraft (FCDA) and a Lotus F1 racing car.

The AMC will also feature the Virtalis Virtual Reality Theatre which will allow attendees to see the power of the relationship between design, manufacture, and data — all in virtual reality.

IMTS
www.IMTS.com