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MCI visits Sweden today to celebrate the life of Hannes Olof Gösta Alfvén, who was born today, 30 May in 1908. He is close to our hearts because he was an electrical engineer, a plasma physicist and winner of the Nobel prize in 1970 for physics. His Nobel prize was…
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MCI received a call from a new customer who manufactures portable cabins. Their long serving wood pressure treatment machine had a failed Mitsubishi PLC. Unfortunately, the customer did not have a backup of the PLC program, so it had been very difficult to get the machine running again without MCI’s…
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Today MCI goes back in time…. way, waaay back in time to the Elizabethan period. In fact, the person we want to celebrate today is William Gilbert. He was Elizabeth I’s doctor. This extremely clever man was at the dawn of science as we know it and was the first…
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A long standing MCI customer, who makes gas turbines for industry, civil and defence aerospace etc. had a broken spark erosion machine. This machine is used to cut vanes for turbines from very hard materials like titanium. Traditionally, a milling machine would be used to cut materials, but because the…
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Following an obsolescence audit at a customer’s facility, an expensive upgrade was recommended by the machine manufacturer which would result in loss of production for some time. As a more cost effective solution, MCI was asked to keep the original machinery going by sourcing three obsolete drives. Not only would…
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This week MCI wants to look at the life of Joseph Henry, an electrical inventor extraordinaire. He discovered electromagnetic induction whilst building electromagnets. He also discovered mutual inductance independent of Faraday. However, Faraday was the first to make the discovery and publish it. Following the theme of electromagnets, Joseph Henry…
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This week, MCI remembers an event that would herald the future, the famous chess game between the Deep Blue IBM computer and Garry Kasparov. Kasparov had claimed that he couldn’t be beaten by any computer and the tournament was set up. The first game in February 1996 was won by…
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MCI received a touch screen control panel from one of our regular customers. The touch screen had been damaged by someone using a ballpoint pen on it. MCI’s engineers replaced the damaged parts and tested it before returning it to the customer. One happy customer and the machine was back…
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MCI wants to look into the world of zippers, because today is National Zipper Day in the USA. Also, the zip (as we know it in the UK) was invented by an electrical engineer. It can’t get better than that! The zipper is one of the most underrated inventions in…
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MCI has a customer who sells and refurbishes machinery. This time, they had a centre lathe that could not power up. We received an old KTK DC Thyristor drive and motor to test and repair from it. Our engineers set to work, and found lots of blown electronic components, Relays…
