This grant provides funding to support the Workshop on Future Research Needs in Advanced Manufacturing from Industrial Prospective; August 11-13, 2013; Arlington, Virginia. This workshop aims to provide a forum for leaders in industry and academia to formulate the long term research goals in the area of manufacturing, particularly innovative manufacturing processes and equipment, and to enhance respective process capabilities while taking into account impacts on industrial ecology, for example, raw materials consumption and environmental impact. A diverse group of individuals from both academia and industry will come together to discuss the future manufacturing challenges and research needs from industrial perspective. Major activities of the workshop include presentations by industrial leaders and NSF program directors, as well as interactions among workshop attendees.
The workshop will create a long-term impact on the future research needs and directions. The expected outcome includes outlook to manufacturing research, suggestions of future research directions, and an establishment of a channel for long term dialogue between industrial leaders and academic researchers. Results from this workshop will be disseminated at a public website and to professional societies, and will be presented at manufacturing conferences.
This workshop gathered together academic, industry and federal government personnel. Several key issues were discussed including the structure of academic-industry partnerships, suggestions for future research directions, the creation of an industrial commons for solving pre-competitive challenges in manufacturing, training of the manufacturing workforce, the individual roles that each of industry, academia and federal funding agencies can play with respect to creating and sustaining future manufacturing institutes, and IP policy. Intellectual Merits: Manufacturing covers many industrial sectors, commonly including aerospace, automotive, biomedical, and consumer products; and also chemical production as pointed by NSF grantees. Some of the common needs merged from this workshop are: a) multiphysics predictive modeling of materials development and materials transformation in the manufacturing process chain; b) speedy innovations of manufacturing processes for producing new materials at a low cost;c) process monitor and control at the mega scale; and d) data analytics for system optimization. Broader Impacts: The workshop attendees recommended NSF to be a facilitator in the future US manufacturing ecosystem by funding new ideas while allowing the risk of failure, and by funding individual creative work while encouraging collaborations at different platforms, for example, through consortiums or through education programs. The workshop attendees also pointed out that mutually beneficial IP existence is needed to facilitate an open exchange of ideas and domain knowledge, which is critical to commercializing innovations from the laboratory scale to the industrial production scale.
