The Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI) hosted an open house to celebrate the launch of the Georgia Manufacturing 4.0 Consortium. The event took place inside Georgia Tech’s Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility (AMPF) on April 14, 2022. The 20,000 square foot research and development facility is located on Georgia Tech’s campus.
AMPF open house activities included an informational session, tour, equipment demos, and networking reception. Attendees from more than 45 companies learned how to engage with the Georgia manufacturing community through workforce development programs, technology pilot programs, and research activities to innovate and accelerate secure integration of Industry 4.0 technologies into Georgia manufacturing.
The newly created Georgia 4.0 Manufacturing Consortium is an industry-academia-government consortium that advances and deploys manufacturing technologies into the market. By leveraging the latest in manufacturing developments and technologies, consortium members have unique opportunities to compete more effectively to become global leaders.
“Georgia Tech’s AMPF provides a world-leading proving grounds for developing, de-risking, and piloting new manufacturing technologies to make them ready for commercial adoption,” said Aaron Stebner, associate professor in the Woodruff School and Mechanical Engineering, and School of Materials Science and Engineering. “AMPF was enabled through Georgia Tech’s manufacturing research partnerships with Boeing and Delta. In it’s first two years, the mission has expanded to include collaboration with more than a dozen companies. Establishing the Georgia Manufacturing 4.0 Consortium provides a vehicle to include dozens more companies in each of the future years, with emphasis on growing the participation of small businesses supported through grant subsidies.”
The consortium will conduct research, offer workforce training, provide small manufacturers with the ability to use advanced manufacturing tools, gain information to drive product and material changeovers, innovate new products, provide economic diversification, accelerate product development cycles, and adopt Industry 4.0 technologies.
Georgia Tech’s AMPF was created by a $3 million gift from the Delta Air Lines Foundation and was intentionally designed as a flexible space that can house future manufacturing innovation projects of almost all types, from additive/hybrid manufacturing to composites, digital manufacturing/industry 4.0, and industrial robotics. Current AMPF industry partners range from aerospace and automotive companies to materials manufacturing companies.
The AMPF is a flagship component of the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute and is a special, reconfigurable R&D high bay manufacturing facility where companies work alongside researchers and students to take early-stage concepts from idea to reality. With each new project and innovation, AMPF is where the factory of the future is being envisioned and created.
The Georgia 4.0 Manufacturing Consortium was created with funding from the Department of Defense (DOD) Office of Local Defense Community Cooperation. This DOD office helps states and communities strengthen critical relationships with Department of Defense’s assets and installations. Small businesses (less than 100 employees) will be able to receive discounted consortium membership rates as a result of this DOD grant funding. While DOD funded the consortium, companies outside of the defense industry are also welcome to be part of the consortium.
“Creating a valuable advanced manufacturing pilot facility and holding this industry-focused open house has been a long-term key goal. Our new governance structure is allowing AMPF to incorporate industry partners as members of AMPF along with the establishment of this new consortium for small and medium companies to join at a discounted rate,” said George White, director for strategic partnerships in the Office of the Vice President for Interdisciplinary Research.
“I also want to thank Ben Wang, executive director of the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute, for his strong, unwavering support to build AMPF. With Ben’s support, we’ve been able to build a world-class R&D pilot facility to advance manufacturing technology and solve problems for a variety of industry partners over many years—and will continue to do so for many other industry partners.”
Companies interested in joining the Georgia 4.0 Manufacturing Consortium can contact George White or Aaron Stebner at Georgia Tech.
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Walter Rich
The SecureAmerica Institute (SAI) and the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) Institute are partnering with Georgia Tech to investigate how robotics and automation in manufacturing can enhance the resiliency, flexibility, and competitiveness of U.S. industrial base supply chains, thanks to a $5 million grant award from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
The project plans to create the Robotics and Automation Decision Framework for Agility and Resilience (RADAR). This framework will allow small and medium-sized manufacturers (SMMs) to systemically evaluate the cost-to-benefit ratio of integrating robotics and automation for aiding the response to supply chain disruptions due to public health crises like COVID-19 and additional economic threats.
“The RADAR end-to-end supply chain framework encompasses macro-scale and micro-scale modeling, along with physical demonstration, by bringing together interdisciplinary capabilities of elite partners from SAI and ARM — including the Texas Manufacturing Assistance Center, Georgia Institute of Technology, General Electric, Deloitte, and Morgan State University — to serve the requirements set by NIST,” said Eleftherios Lakovou, Ph.D., SAI’s manufacturing supply chain director and principal investigator on the project.
He sees the award as an exciting and potent validation of the unique footprint SAI has established and a way for the institute to provide innovative solutions to national priorities.
“The project is particularly valuable because it empowers SMMs, who form the backbone of the nation’s industrial base,” Lakovou continued. “Small manufacturers often lack the scale and human capital needed to increase their use of automation and robotics to position themselves favorably in the sophisticated, next-generation, cost-competitive, agile and resilient supply chains of America’s future.”
“We are delighted to work with the team at the SecureAmerica Institute on this important project,” said Arnie Kravitz, chief innovation officer at the ARM Institute. “Our work will help smaller manufacturers make better decisions in the face of the current and future pandemics.”
The Georgia Tech team will contribute to this initiative by providing already developed and validated supply chain simulation software and extending it to stress test supply chains so that small manufacturers can be better informed of what risks their supply chains might face, how these risks can be mitigated, and what role robotics and automation can play as a source of supply chain productivity and risk mitigation.
RADAR’s funding is provided by the American Rescue Act and is part of a larger $54 million initiative by NIST to award high-impact projects for pandemic response research and development across eight manufacturing institutes in the Manufacturing USA network.
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Walter Rich
BioMADE, a Manufacturing Innovation Institute sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense, has recently funded a research project at Georgia Tech entitled ‘Stress Testing Supply Chains and their Ecosystems for Levels of Trust, Security, Resilience, Agility, and Competitiveness’. Headed by faculty members Chip White, Kevin Wang, and Ben Wang, this project will design, develop, and validate a simulation platform to stress test end-to-end bioindustrial manufacturing facilities and supply chains resiliency over multiple risks with the intent of strengthening American competitiveness and creating more robust and resilient supply chains.
Bioindustrial manufacturing uses living organisms such as bacteria, yeast, and algae, to make new products or replacements for current products that are more sustainable and environmentally friendly than current processes.
The simulation platform will be a customizable decision support system that will target disruptions that may be faced by supply chains in the biomanufacturing industry. Understanding the impact on performance of each disruption can lead to supply chain design and operations changes that will produce improved levels of supply chain performance when disruptions occur.
“Although this project is initially focused on supply chain productivity at the product or firm level, it is also intended to provide insight into how investments in the bioindustrial ecosystem can improve bioindustrial supply chain supply chain performance while ensuring the Nation’s public health, defense, and economic security,” said White.
Understanding how performance at the product- and firm-level throughout the industry contributes to industry ecosystem performance, and vice versa, will help to inform both future product- and firm-level supply chain design and the development of the Nation’s bioindustrial ecosystem.
Chip White holds the Schneider National Chair of Transportation and Logistics and is a professor in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. Kan Wang, Ph.D., is a senior research engineer in the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI). Ben Wang is executive director of GTMI, holds the Gwaltney Chair in Manufacturing Systems and is a professor in both the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the School of Materials Science and Engineering.
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Walter Rich
Aaron Stebner, associate professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech, was named one of the top 5 3D printing videos by the AM Chronicle due to his recorded seminar focused on "Machine Learning for Metals Additive Manufacturing".
This seminar was sponsored by the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI) and was presented live on March 8, 2021. Stebner is also a faculty member of GTMI.
Below is AM Chronicle's short article with link to the original posting:
AM Chronicle content team brings to you the top 5 trending and informative videos on metal 3D printing.
Metal Additive manufacturing is one of the most trending sectors in the additive manufacturing industry. The technology was initially considered impossible due to the complex material science behind the melting and solidification of metals and its integration with the 3D printing layer-by-layer approach. But today, metal additive manufacturing is widely accepted in the industry and considered to be an essential part of Industry 4.0. Go through some of the interesting content presented by AM Chronicle on metal 3D printing videos.
Link to the full AM Chronicle article with the top 5 3D printing videos:
https://www.amchronicle.com/insights/top-5-informative-videos-on-metal-3d-printing/
Past Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute seminars can be found here:
https://research.gatech.edu/manufacturing/pastlectures
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Walter Rich
While deciding on career paths as an undergraduate, Boeing engineer Toni Cvitanic sampled courses in biology, chemistry, engineering, and computer science. But it wasn’t until joining an intercollegiate car-building competition—where he and other college students worked to design and fabricate formula-style racing cars and competed against other clubs— that his aspirations came into focus.
The son of a mathematics professor, Cvitanic marveled at how his math and science skills could steadily improve a race car’s performance. And yet, over time, he realized that the engineering question at hand was not audacious enough. The basic facts of each car—that it would have four wheels, an engine, a suspension—would not change from one model to the next, and any improvement would have to be incremental.
“I realized I wanted to work on new problems that haven’t been figured out,” he recalled. “Problems where you don’t necessarily know the solution or even how one might work.”
Instead of following in his father’s footstep, Cvitanic set his sights on engineering and began pursuing a Ph.D. in robotics from Georgia Tech.
In 2016, Cvitanic joined the Technology Transition Laboratory (TTL), born out of a longstanding university partnership between Boeing and Georgia Tech. For Cvitanic, joining the TTL meant working on projects with a much higher TRL, or technology readiness level, than most academic research—making the ideas much more likely to become applied on the factory floor at Boeing.
Cvitanic helped lead the TTL’s research into dual robotic machining, which could one day be used for automated precision machining and fabrication. The aim was to improve the accuracy of industrial robots—commonly used in automotive manufacturing—so they could meet more stringent aerospace tolerance requirements.
To meet tolerances within five-thousandths of an inch, or slightly wider than a human hair, Cvitanic’s team needed a new approach.
Working alongside three Boeing engineers who oversaw the work, they added sensors and a laser tracker to a pair of off-the-shelf Kuka industrial robots. While one robot held an aluminum work piece, the other would begin an assigned machining activity: either milling or drilling holes. As the Georgia Tech team observed the robots, they received real-time performance data and control feedback.
The significant process forces from both kinds of operations caused the arms of the robots to vibrate and flex, which in turn affected the final achievable tolerance of the work. With the data they gathered, the researchers began to model how specific robotic arm configurations, or poses, could counter resisting forces and improve precision. This led to improvements in the robots’ arm stiffness, and it also eliminated bending, both vital to offsetting the effects of high-force manufacturing. Ultimately, the team configured the robots to manufacture parts to aerospace tolerances, and they were able to meet the accuracy requirements achieved with machine tools and gantry-style crane systems, which are used in today’s manufacturing processes.
The Georgia Tech researchers made enough progress to host a successful live demonstration in front of a Boeing audience. The results furthered the Boeing-Georgia Tech university partnership and led to the creation of the Accurate Robotic Machining (ARM) project and the Boeing Manufacturing Development Center (BMDC) in 2017. The center gives future students opportunities to work on projects from the concept stage to application.
After earning his doctorate, Cvitanic joined Boeing in October 2021. He parlayed the experience he gained and the relationships he built as a graduate student into a new role. As a manufacturing and simulation engineer based in Charleston, South Carolina, he works in Boeing’s Research and Technology organization. He regularly partners with the very engineers who helped guide his project work at Georgia Tech, and together, they explore scenarios in which advanced production systems can be implemented.
“Ultimately, I know I will see the impact of what I’m working on,” Cvitanic says of his role at Boeing. “That impact is gratifying.”
MEDIA CONTACTS:
Walter Rich
Georgia Tech Research Communications
walter.rich@research.gatech.edu
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Walter Rich
The Novelis scholars program review committee at the Georgia Institute of Technology received 34 nominations and selected six graduate students as the inaugural group of Novelis Scholars for the 2021-2022 academic year. The winning scholars are:
- Andrés Felipe Castro Méndez, a third-year Ph.D. student in the School of Materials Science and Engineering. His research focuses on understanding the formation thermodynamics of lead halide perovskites deposited by thermal co-evaporation.
- Carlos Fernández, a Ph.D. student in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. His research interests are in reactor design and computational methods for efficient electrochemical CO2 conversion to high-value fuels.
- Rupesh Kumar Mahendran, a second year Ph.D. student in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. His research is focused on physics-based and data-driven model development for shape-memory alloy (SMA) alloy, manufacturing, and part design, including developing high throughput methodology and surrogate models to accelerate SMA developments.
- Rupesh Rajendran, a Ph.D. student in the School of Materials Science & Engineering. His research is focused on understanding the effects of post-processing treatments and microstructure on corrosion, stress corrosion cracking, and mechanical behavior of additively manufactured (AM) 7xxx series aluminum alloys for aerospace applications.
- Tingli Xie, a Ph.D. student in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. Her research areas of interest are deep learning, uncertainty quantification and fault diagnosis. The goal of her research is to develop intelligent computational methods to provide accurate diagnosis of key faults by fusing multiple sensor resources in manufacturing systems.
- Wei Yang, who is pursuing a Ph.D. degree in machine learning and a M.S. degree in statistics in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. His research interest is on high dimensional data analysis for process monitoring and diagnosis using functional profiles, images and videos with applications in manufacturing and energy sectors.
The Novelis Innovation Hub at Georgia Tech announced the launch of the Novelis Scholars Program during fall 2021. The program seeks to recognize and cultivate top graduate students conducting research in various aspects of sustainability, high-throughput materials discovery, surface functionalization, and artificial intelligence (AI)/data science applications in materials, manufacturing, and supply chain technology.
Novelis has partnered with Georgia Tech to collaborate on research and development, and promote the education of the next generation of engineers dedicated to making better products that lead to a more sustainable world. Novelis is headquartered in Atlanta with a global footprint, over 12,500 employees, and recorded $12.3 billion in revenue for its 2020 fiscal year. Novelis recently expanded its research partnership with Georgia Tech.
The Novelis Innovation Hub expects to issue its next call for Novelis Scholars for the 2022‐2023 Academic Year in Spring/early Summer 2022.
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Walter Rich
On October 28, 2021, the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI) celebrated its 30th anniversary. The celebration event opened with a warm welcome from Ben Wang, executive director of GTMI, and concluded with GTMI’s annual distinguished lecture presented by Naveed Hussain, chief technology officer, vice president and general manager of Boeing research and technology.
Wang is the Eugene C. Gwaltney Jr. Chair in Manufacturing Systems, professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at Georgia Tech.
Wang became the executive director of the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Research Center in January, 2012. Wang replaced Steven Danyluk, professor emeritus and Morris M. Bryan, Jr. Chair in Mechanical Engineering for Advanced Manufacturing Systems. Danyluk started his tenure as the director of the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Research Center in 1995.
At the 30th anniversary, Wang recalled the creation of Georgia Tech’s manufacturing center as a great example of a public-private partnership that started in 1991 when Georgia Tech, the Department of Defense, AT&T, Ford, Intel and Motorola helped to create a world-class research organization that started life known as the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Research Center who later became the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute.
At the event, Wang stressed the need for building a strong manufacturing base in the United States. “Technology-based innovation is the dominant driver of economic growth in the 21st century,” said Wang. “Our national security, high standard of living, and the rebuilding of the middle class all depend on a maintaining a strong manufacturing base.”
During his introductory remarks, Wang presented a short GTMI 30th anniversary video which can be viewed here.
When Wang became the executive director, his vision focused on what he called big “M” manufacturing. According to Wang, this included not only the creation of new materials, advanced composites, and biomaterials, but also included manufacturing processes as well as factory automation. It also incorporates supply chain management and enterprise transformation. Materials and manufacturing complement each other according to Wang. He emphasized manufacturing adds value and transforms raw materials into products we use daily.
The 30th anniversary event briefly highlighted the research being done in GTMI’s Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility (AMPF). Both Boeing and Delta Airlines have made significant investments to be part of AMPF. This innovative facility allows faculty, students, and industry partners to work with emerging technologies to research new ideas and solve industry problems, and the facility is designed to be flexible with the ability to evolve as new technologies become available.
An introduction to the AMPF facility can be viewed here.
Capping off the 30th celebration event was GTMI’s annual distinguished lecture which was delivered by Naveed Hussain, chief technology officer, vice president and general manager of Boeing research and technology. Hussain presented an overview of the Boeing company, emphasized the value of the Georgia Tech-Boeing partnership, and discussed the future of manufacturing at Boeing.
A full recording of GTMI’s 30th anniversary event, a more in-depth look at AMPF, and the distinguished lecture delivered by Naveed Hussain can be found here.
Speakers during the 30th anniversary AMPF presentations included: Christopher Saldana, Ring Family Professor and associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering; Andrew Dugenske, director of the Factory Information Systems Center and principal research engineer at GTMI; Shreyes Melkote, who holds the Morris M. Bryan, Jr. Professorship in Mechanical Engineering and is the associate director of GTMI; Chuck Zhang, Harold E. Smalley Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering; and George White, interim vice president in the Office of Industry Collaboration at Georgia Tech.
The 30th anniversary event was organized by Paige Shee, strategic partners officer in GTMI.