The existing Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC) for Friction Stir Processing at the University of Missouri-Rolla, and the I/UCRC for E-Design at Virginia Polytechnic Institute have joined to do a collaborative research project designed to bring Friction Stir Process (FSP) to the design community. The project will provide a unifying tool to the product designer to synthesize solutions by bringing in discrete and distributed pieces of knowledge about function, form, shape, size, materials, manufacturing processes, tooling, life cycle cost, testing, and quality. The creation of the FSP case repository will be the first of its kind and it is anticipated to be very helpful for researchers and practitioners in the field that are considering using FSP.
