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

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.

On October 28, 2021, the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI) celebrated its 30^th 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 30^th 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 21^st 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 30^th 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 30^th 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 30^th 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 30^th anniversary event, a more in-depth look at AMPF, and the distinguished lecture delivered by Naveed Hussain can be found here.

Speakers during the 30^th 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 30^th anniversary event was organized by Paige Shee, strategic partners officer in GTMI.

There’s a lot more to running a factory than manufacturing. Companies must also maximize the materials they use, minimize a wide range of costs, and reduce or eliminate factory floor time delays—while running many factories with a just in time inventory approach. So, when Moog, Inc., the well-known maker of motion control components for aircraft, entertainment, industry, defense, and the medical industries, wanted to keep their factories running at peak condition, they knew the engineers at the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI) were the ones to call on.

“Tech brings a strong expertise in applying their research knowledge to areas that are important to us, like vibration research, telemetry, and they know how to apply that knowledge to manufacturing,” said Lance Johnson, advanced manufacturing engineering manager at Moog. “What’s more, they know how we think, and they know what we need."

Having partnered for nearly a decade, lately, the two institutions have been collaborating in the arena of the Internet of Things for Manufacturing to help Moog keep abreast of the health, performance, and utilization of its assembly lines.

“GTMI’s work allows us to really understand the health and productivity of our machines, and more fundamentally, it allows us to optimize our processes, no matter what component we’re assembling at the time,” said Johnson.

For example, a company may want to run its machines at a high pace, but if they don’t understand how that would wear on the parts, they may cycle through them too quickly, or even worse, must shut the line down for maintenance at an inopportune time. If they go the opposite route and play it safe, they can minimize parts fatigue but not produce enough. They lose money in either scenario.

“You don’t want to have to shut down the line for repairs while you’re in the middle of creating parts that are critical to the consumer, nor do you want to push too hard and make bad parts,” explained Johnson.

Using its expertise and software to analyze the machines' vibrations and physical stress, GTMI helps Moog operate its lines at peak efficiency. This helps Moog keep its assembly lines healthy and maintains the quality of their wares.

The project involves using GTMI’s architecture as a universal translator to convert all of the assembly lines’ various protocols to a standard one. This ensures that all areas of the factory can talk to each other, which helps them cut costs.

“Integration costs to implement factory information systems are often underestimated, yet unexpected costs are a real pain point for companies,” said Andrew Dugenske, director of the Factory Information Systems Center and principal research engineer at GTMI. “Our decoupled digital architecture provides a clear advantage by reducing integration costs.”

When it comes to understanding the most complex issues in today’s manufacturing world, GTMI is on top.

“We’re an advanced company in terms of our manufacturing capabilities,” said Johnson. “Their work is invaluable in helping us bridge the divide between the classical core research and the new research being done on vibration. They can contextualize it to the areas that are important to us.”

One thing that distinguishes GTMI from other centers, said Johnson, is that they’re approachable. “They're easy to talk to and understand how to contextualize the research into solutions that work on the issues that we face,” said Johnson.

Another distinction is the insightful interns GTMI provides. "It's really amazing. The interns who come out of Georgia Tech already understand the problems we’re working on because they already understand manufacturing. So, when they arrive, they're able to hit the ground running,” he explained.

Nathan Devol was working at Hubble Lighting when he decided he was missing the research aspect of his career, so he decided to go back to school to get his Ph.D. at Tech. He’s been working with Moog since he arrived on campus two years ago.

"One of the things I've liked about working with Moog is that the problems we’re working on are continually evolving,” said Devol. “Another thing is that we’re not just working on tightly controlled projects, like one often does in a research environment. The solutions we deliver have to be able to scale up to work at the factory level.”

Devol experienced this when he was monitoring the vibrations of manufacturing equipment. The trouble came when they were collecting vibration data and sending it up to the cloud to process and observe it.

“We had this problem where we’re sampling the vibration data at around 10,000 samples per second, and the cloud just couldn’t handle it, so there were huge latencies,” said Devol. “I started looking and found that if we compressed the data before sending it to the cloud, we would be able to work with it without the backlog.”

It worked beautifully.

“They’re doing a great job,” said Johnson. “I really like how they can get up to speed quickly with what we’re doing and apply the research and problems they’re working on at Tech to our problems in manufacturing.”

It’s a win-win relationship that promises to deliver benefits to both institutions for years to come.

 

About Moog Inc.
Moog Inc. is a worldwide designer, manufacturer, and integrator of precision control components and systems. Moog’s high-performance systems control military and commercial aircraft, satellites and space vehicles, launch vehicles, missiles, automated industrial machinery, and marine and medical equipment. Additional information about the company can be found at www.moog.com.

 

Story by David Terraso

A total of eight students, including three military veterans, graduated from the Research Experience for Student Veterans in Advanced Manufacturing and Entrepreneurship (REVAMP) 2021 summer program. This veteran-focused program is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and hosted each summer by the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI)--officially serving as a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) site for NSF.

The coordinator of this education and work force development (EWD) program is Billyde Brown, Ph.D., a senior research faculty and EWD director at GTMI. Brown's role is to create strong partnerships among industry, government, and academia in manufacturing research, development, and deployment, while acquiring and managing sponsored research programs.  

Current and past students have performed fundamental research projects in advanced manufacturing topic areas such as additive and hybrid manufacturing, composite joining and repair, cell therapy manufacturing, robotic machining, integrated computational materials engineering, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, and data analytics for adaptive manufacturing, and nanoscale 3D printing.

REVAMP’s major program activities include a seminar series on a broad array of manufacturing-related topics by Georgia Tech faculty and graduate students, external manufacturing plant tours (e.g. Kia Motors, Hyundai Mobis, Lockheed Martin, Textron Specialized Vehicles), experiential learning classes on the fundamentals of evidence-based entrepreneurship provided by Georgia Tech’s VentureLab and Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), a panel discussion from successful minority business enterprise clients of the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) Center in Atlanta, and three oral presentations delivered by students to demonstrate their research progress.

A new program element started in 2019 that offered a student veteran orientation, panel discussions, luncheon events, and tours of Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) facilities both on the main campus and Marietta locations that were facilitated together with GTRI veteran faculty and the Georgia Tech Veterans Resource Center director. REVAMP is one of the premier REU programs in the nation for advanced manufacturing research and entrepreneurship training for undergraduate student veterans.

This year’s REVAMP-REU 10-week summer program was held from May 18 – July 24 at GTMI located on the Georgia Tech main campus. Students worked under the supervision of different faculty mentors to complete a research project centered on cutting-edge manufacturing science and technology. They also received entrepreneurship training by conducting customer discovery interviews to support a hypothetical product related to their research. As a bonus, eligible students received on-campus housing, $500 towards travel, and a $5,000 stipend.

Congratulations to these student graduates (in bold text) of the summer 2021 REVAMP-REU program and their faculty mentors:

Elizabeth Spahn         
Faculty mentor: Tequila Harris, associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering        
Project: “Formation of Gradient Thin Film using Scalable Coating Method”

Jabari Acre     
Faculty mentor: Sourabh Saha, assistant professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering                     
Project: “Two Photon Additive Manufacturing”

Anthony Whylie        
Faculty mentor: Aaron Stebner, associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering       
Project: “Optimization of Process Parameters for Additively Manufacturing Nickel Titanium (NiTi)”

Pedro Alcolea
Faculty mentor: Krishnendu Roy, professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering                
Project: “Advanced Mesenchymal Stromal Cell Manufacturing

Allison Jung   
Faculty mentor: Yan Wang, professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering                  
Project: “Optimization of 3D Printing Head

Jacob Totri     
Faculty mentors: Keat Ghee Ong & Bob Guldberg, professors at the University of Oregon
Project 1: “Magnetoelastic Sensors for Real-Time Tracking of Cell Growth”

Faculty mentor: Chuck Zhang, professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Project 2: “Printed Sensors for In-situ Structural Health Monitoring of Composite Aircraft Structures”

Nathan Janda
Faculty mentor: Shreyes Melkote, professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering       
Project: “Robotics and Hybrid Manufacturing”

Devon Phelps
Faculty mentor: Raghu Pucha, Ph.D., principal lecturer in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering  
Project: “Modeling of Hybrid Composites with Nanofillers

More information about the Research Experience for Student Veterans in Advanced Manufacturing and Entrepreneurship (REVAMP) summer program can be found here.

Based at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta), the Center for Composite and Hybrid Materials Interfacing (CHMI) intends to dramatically improve how composite and hybrid structures are joined and repaired. The Center is one of four active National Science Foundation (NSF) Industry/University Cooperative Research Centers (IUCRCs) at Georgia Tech. Funded for five years with an NSF IUCRC grant, the Center will reportedly work closely with an industry consortium of leading manufacturers and government organizations that will underwrite research projects.

Housed in the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI), the Center incorporates three university research teams from Georgia Tech, Oakland University (Detroit, Mich., U.S.) and University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UT). Each research and development partner are said to bring decades of composite and hybrid materials research focus in specific industries: Georgia Tech in aerospace, Oakland University in automotive composite systems and UT in infrastructure and medical devices.

“The study of the interface between composite, metallic and other electronic materials is really the future of manufacturing,” says Ben Wang, executive director of GTMI. “The Center amplifies the thought leadership of Georgia Tech advancement in composites. It also puts us in the nexus of three areas: advanced manufacturing, innovative materials and data analytics.”

Center director Chuck Zhang, Harold E. Smalley Professor in Georgia Tech’s H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE), will drive CHMI’s vision to transform the current labor-intensive, experience-based joining and repair practice into fast, automated and reliable processes.

“Using advanced computation, experimental, data analytics and digital techniques and tools, we hope to reduce by 50% the overall cost, cycle time and variation of these processes in the next 10 years,” Zhang says.

Read the full article in CompositesWorld, August 2021.

Complete article also posted at Georgia Tech - written by Anne Sargent

From Washington D.C., the Brookings Institute recently convened a virtual panel of manufacturing experts that included Ben Wang, executive director of the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute. Wang holds the Gwaltney Chair in Manufacturing Systems and is a professor both in the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering, and School of Materials Science and Engineering. He served as the previous chair of the National Materials and Manufacturing Board.

The panel’s topic: “Can the Biden Administration Improve the Manufacturing Sector?”

Other panelists included: David Cicilline, member of the U.S. House of Representatives; Monica Gorman, deputy assistant secretary, manufacturing industry & analysis, U.S. Department of Commerce; Elisabeth Reynolds, special assistant to the President for manufacturing and economic development, National Economic Council, the White House; Darrell West, vice president and director governance studies, the Brookings Institution; and John Hazen White, Jr., executive chairman, Taco Family of Companies Trustee, the Brookings Institution.

During the panel’s second session, Wang emphasized, “advanced manufacturing is foundational to our [nation’s] economic prosperity, resilience and the national security.” He was previously involved with President Obama administration’s advanced manufacturing partnership from 2011 to 2013.

“Building a strong manufacturing base in the U.S. is a national imperative,” said Wang. “We know that technology-based innovation is the dominant driver of economic growth in the 21st century. Our national security, standard of living, and rebuilding the middle class in our society all depends on a strong globally competitive manufacturing base.”

Wang stressed the need to have a vibrant innovation value chain tightly coupled with a strong manufacturing ecosystem. “We cannot separate innovation from manufacturing,” said Wang.
“Some policymakers believed that we could continue to innovate and leave manufacturing to other nations. As it turned out, not only did we lose our ability to produce high tech products, we began to lose our ability to innovate.”

“If we want to compete well globally, we must maintain both the technological innovation leadership and advance manufacturing leadership [in the United States],” said Wang.

The need was also stressed to support small and medium-sized manufacturers who contribute to the nation’s supply chain and overall GDP in a significant way, but lack resources to evaluate and adopt new, state of the art manufacturing technologies.

National and state Manufacturing Extension Partnerships (MEP) can play a critical role in helping these smaller entities with technology adoption.

According to Wang, regional ecosystem actors must work together to identify common manufacturing challenges and common opportunities. And then co-innovate around those common challenges and opportunities. This type of regional approach will push local companies to rethink how they should interact with one another and help ensure that benefits are shared by all.

Ben Wang’s entire presentation and the full panel discussion which was sponsored and moderated by the Brookings Institution can be found here.

According to Chelsea White, professor in the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute, “supply chains don’t like disruptions—especially low-cost supply chains—and they’re all low cost.”

White is the Schneider National Chair in Transportation and Logistics, and professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech​.

“When demand is smooth and supply is balanced with demand, supply chains run well and inexpensively,” said White.

However, covid has caused dramatic drops and increases in demand, thus adding to supply disruptions. A rapid recovery in the United States has helped spike that dramatic increase.

In addition to dramatic demand flucuation, the supply side of this was also interrupted with shipping workers in China contracting covid, reducing the capacity to move goods out of major Chinese ports. With the dramatic rise in demand, congestion has been causing further delays even though the supply chains have plenty of capacity according to White.

White says some of this lack of smooth supply and demand is self-inflicted, “container ships have gotten much bigger, naturally causing surges all over the freight transportation system – ocean carriers, rail, and trucks. The tariffs kicking in caused ‘front loading,’ which we’re seeing now to ensure shelves will be stocked during the holidays at the end of the calendar year.”

“We’re finding out that the global freight transportation system is less resilient than originally thought,” said White. “My prediction for 2021 is there will be toys on the shelves for the Christmas holidays, but perhaps not as many toys and their prices may be higher.”

Chelsea White, along with other experts, were recently interviewed by CBS News in Atlanta, Georgia. You can view White’s interview and learn more about the supply chain crisis topic here: CBS46 News, Supply Chain Crisis Forcing Shoppers to Buy Early.

A stellar product can only get a company so far in today’s global marketplace. A truly successful enterprise needs to be able to make quick adaptations to its manufacturing lines so it can respond as the market changes. It’s a tricky process requiring a deep understanding of the data and the organization’s systems and culture, which is why firms seek the guidance of the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI).

“We help companies overcome barriers by applying researched technology and Georgia Tech's expertise to the problem,” said Andrew Dugenske, director of the Factory Information Systems Center and principal research engineer at GTMI. He just completed a major effort with Steelcase, a century-plus-old company that designs workspaces around the people who use them.

“We like to say we are students of the workplace,” said Paul Noll, senior researcher at Steelcase. “We watch how people work. We study their behaviors. We study the activity. We learn, and then we build our products and services to support what we see.”

Steelcase approached GTMI, Noll said, not only because of the Institute’s superior reputation in manufacturing but also because they’ve found everyone at Tech has a natural curiosity for both the task and the culture of their partners.

“It was very much the professional work environment at Tech as well as the expertise,” added Edward Vander Bilt, who leads the partnership at Steelcase.

Merging Expertise with Technology

Fundamental to their relationship is the Industrial Internet of Things, a term for using the information from the various sensors, computers, and robotic devices a company uses in manufacturing, to refine, even redefine the way the assembly line operates.

GTMI worked with Steelcase on an array of projects designed to improve the intelligence, responsiveness, and adaptability of their manufacturing lines. In one endeavor, they improved assembly lines by embedding them with Georgia Tech’s digital architecture. The digital systems move information from the lines into the cloud, where it can be processed. Then Steelcase uses the data to decide how to alter manufacturing processes.

“One of the big challenges of manufacturing is that some companies have legacy equipment, so it can't easily transfer the information about its activities into the cloud," said GTMI’s Dugenske. “We have developed a method to retrofit these lines so companies can use the Industrial Internet of Things to their advantage.”

Now the company has expanded this capability to all its lines throughout North America.

“We’ve been using our digital architecture with several companies, and it’s worked really well for them,” added Dugenske.

Collaboration is the Name of the Game

Helping a firm improve elements as indelible as production processes isn’t something that can be accomplished after just a few high-level meetings. It’s a mission that requires understanding the wisdom of employees working on the lines.

“It was extremely collaborative,” said Vander Bilt. “Andrew Dugenske visited all of our factories in North America, observing and talking with the plant managers and leaders in a whole variety of disciplines to better understand how we operate as a company.”

And when it came time to implement the findings, Dugenske headed back on the road to help put those recommendations into practice.

“It was quite intense,” added Vander Bilt, who said that one of the most valuable elements came from working with the graduate and undergraduate students.

Students built and installed prototypes in the factories and worked with Steelcase’s engineers to adjust to the conditions of each location. Vander Bilt said this gave the company high confidence that the solutions were the right ones.

Working at the Intersection of People and Technology

Steelcase and Georgia Tech have been working together since 2005 on projects around working environments and merging the physical and digital worlds.

“From the beginning of our relationship, they've described themselves as designing the future of how people interact with each other,” said Beth Mynatt, executive director of Tech’s Institute for People and Technology (IPaT).

Now, at the tail end of the COVID-19 pandemic, that future looks a little different than it did at the start of 2020, and remote working looks like it will be part of everyday life, added Mynatt.

Siva Jayaraman, IPaT’s strategic partnerships director, introduced Steelcase to GTMI. He has been working with the company for years on combining the physical and digital worlds through projects like telemedicine booths and spaces fostering collaboration and anonymity to help workers avoid the sometimes stultifying norms of business hierarchies.

“They’re trying to understand the evolving needs of workers and the new modalities, whether that’s remote, in the office, or both," said Jayaraman. “Nobody knows clearly what that is going to look like, but we are helping them to understand it.”

Noll said he values the opportunity to explore the emerging thinking around human-centered technology that happens at GTMI, IPaT, and elsewhere at the Institute.

“Technology is integral to the work, but at the end of the day, we're still human, and we want to be sure the decisions we make about bringing technology into our work are smart, responsible, and human-centered,” said Noll. “That’s why we like working with Tech.”

And when Noll says he likes working with Tech, he means it. Steelcase is also collaborating with the Scheller School of Business, the Supply Chain and Logistics Institute, the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, the School of Materials Science and Engineering, and the School of Aerospace Engineering, to name a few.

It may be the Institute’s exceptional reputation that brings some companies to engage. Still, in the end, it's the quality of the people that solidifies those relationships for years to come.

“We’ve found the more we invest in our relationships, the collaboration, the cooperation, the energy, expertise, and engagement, the more we value that partnership,” said Vander Bilt.

In this case, Steelcase had a hunch their manufacturing lines held information that would help them become more agile and efficient. And from their history working with Georgia Tech, they had a hunch that GTMI had the best people to do it. They were right.

Writer: David Terraso
 

Media Contact:
Walter Rich
Research Communications, Georgia Tech
walter.rich@research.gatech.edu

 

Catastrophic collapse of materials and structures is the inevitable consequence of a chain reaction of locally confined damage – from solid ceramics that snap after the development of a small crack to metal space trusses that give way after the warping of a single strut.

In a study published this week in Advanced Materials, engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of California, Irvine (UCI) describe the creation of a new class of mechanical metamaterials that delocalize deformations to prevent failure.

The team turned to tensegrity, a century-old design principle in which isolated rigid bars are integrated into a flexible mesh of tethers to produce very lightweight, self-tensioning truss structures.

Professor Julian Rimoli, faculty member in the School fo Aerospace Enginering and the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute, and his team were developing structural configurations for planetary landers when they discovered that tensegrity-based vehicles could withstand severe deformation – or buckling – of its individual components without collapsing, something never observed in other structural solutions.

“This gave us the idea of creating metamaterials that exploit the same principle, which led us to the discovery of the first-ever 3D tensegrity metamaterial,” explained Rimoli, aerospace engineering professor and co-author of the study.

Starting with 950 nanometer-diameter members, the team used a sophisticated direct laser writing technique to generate elementary cells sized between 10 and 20 microns. These were built up into eight-unit supercells that could be assembled with others to make a continuous structure.

The researchers then conducted computational modeling and laboratory experiments and observed that the constructs exhibited uniquely homogenous deformation behavior free from localized overstress or underuse.

The team showed that the new metamaterials feature a 25-fold enhancement in deformability and an orders-of-magnitude increase in energy absorption over state-of-the-art lattice arrangements.

“Tensegrity structures have been studied for decades, particularly in the context of architectural design, and they have recently been found in a number of biological systems,” said senior co-author Lorenzo Valdevit, a UCI professor of materials science and engineering who directs the Architected Materials Group.

“Proper periodic tensegrity lattices were theoretically conceptualized only a few years ago by our co-author Julian Rimoli, but through this project we have achieved the first physical implementation and performance demonstration of these metamaterials.”

Made possible by novel additive manufacturing techniques, extremely lightweight yet strong and rigid conventional structures based on micrometer-scale trusses and lattices have been of keen interest to engineers for their potential to replace heavier, solid substances in aircraft, wind turbine blades and a host of other applications.

Though possessing many desirable qualities, these advanced materials can – like any load-bearing structure – still be susceptible to catastrophic destruction if overloaded.

“In familiar nano-architected materials, failure usually starts with a highly localized deformation,” said first author Jens Bauer, a UCI research scientist in mechanical and aerospace engineering. “Shear bands, surface cracks, and buckling of walls and struts in one area can cause a chain reaction leading to the collapse of an entire structure.”

He explained that truss lattices begin to collapse when compressive members buckle, since those in tension cannot. Typically, these parts are interconnected at common nodes, meaning that once one fails, damage can quickly spread throughout the entire structure.

In contrast, the compressive members of tensegrity architectures form closed loops, isolated from one another and only connected by tensile members. Therefore, instability of compressive members can only propagate through tensile load paths, which – provided they do not rupture – cannot experience instability. Push down on a tensegrity system and the whole structure compresses uniformly, preventing localized damage that would otherwise cause catastrophic failure.

Tensegrity Metamaterial

According to Valdevit, who’s also a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UCI, tensegrity metamaterials demonstrate an unprecedented combination of failure resistance, extreme energy absorption, deformability and strength, outperforming all other types of state-of-the-art lightweight architectures.

“This study provides important groundwork for design of superior engineering systems, from reusable impact protection systems to adaptive load-bearing structures,” he said.

This research was made possible by funding from NASA and the National Science Foundation, as well as research conducted by Georgia Tech aerospace engineering graduate student, Julie Kraus and Cameron Crook, a UCI graduate student in materials science and engineering.