Planning Grant: I/UCRC for Intelligent Maintenance Systems (IMS)
1161021 University of Texas-Austin; Dragan Djurdjanovic
The University of Texas-Austin (UT-A) is seeking to join the existing I/UCRC for Intelligent Maintenance Systems (IMS) currently comprised of the University of Cincinnati (lead), the University of Michigan and the Missouri University of Science and Technology.
By joining the existing IMS Center, the UT-A will expand the ongoing IMS research with new ideas and foci grounded in the expertise and research interests of the UT faculty and students. Those new directions include predictive maintenance in semiconductor manufacturing, vehicle technologies, oil industry, renewable energy, power plants and biomedicine. The research in the proposed site will be realized through the following thrusts: 1) Information-theoretical approaches to condition-monitoring; 2) Data-driven methods for operating regime-dependent condition monitoring and prediction 3) Fault-tolerant control of complex engineering systems; 4) Predictive maintenance methods and paradigms in biomedicine and 5) System operations based on the information about the condition of system components.
The US economy spends more than $1 trillion for maintenance of critical assets, with more than 33% of these costs being wasted on ineffective maintenance. The UT-A intends to address this problem by contributing new ideas and leveraging inputs and experiences from numerous new industries that did not benefit enough from the predictive maintenance research. Expected advances in the ability to assess and predict the condition of an engineering system will increase the resilience and improve operation of machines in the future, with reduced waste of resources due to more effective maintenance intervention, and improved usage and productivity due to higher availability of equipment. Broader impacts of the research expected to take place at UT-A will be realized through regular meetings with industrial partners, short courses on diagnostics and maintenance open to industry and academe, regular participation and publication in relevant conferences, and partnerships with universities in the US and abroad.
Since Feb. 1, 2012, the UT team conducted activities towards creating a UT site of the I-UCRC on IMS. These activities were supported by the NSF grant number IIP1161021 and resulted in a workshop held at the UT on May 15th, 2012. Complete information about this workshop can be found on the website [www.me.utexas.edu/~iucrc_ims_ut/]. In summary, the workshop attracted 18 attendees from 10 different companies in areas of semiconductor manufacturing (Applied Materials, Lam Research, KLA-Tenkor, Micron and Samsung), precision instrumentation and software (National Instruments), biomedical engineering (BioResearch Inc.,) and energy (Canrig Drilling Technologies, Hill Country Engineering). In addition, we had Prof. Jay Lee from the University of Cincinnati (Director of the IMS Center), who addressed the audience with explanations of IMS Center operations and benefits to industry, Prof. Tony Hsieng from Texas A&M, who was exploring modalities of I-UCRC operations because of his own interests to create one, as well as numerous UT faculty (Chair of the Mechanical Engineering Department, Associate Dean for Research and others). At the workshop, the UT faculty proposed 6 generic research projects in various areas of predictive maintenance, 5 of which had at least one company member strongly interested in it. The only project that did not receive strong support from at least one company was the project proposing predictive maintenance paradigms in biomedicine, which can be attributed to the fact that only one small company from that field was present and they are currently unable to commit to any research activity (even though they verbally expressed interest to write joint proposals with the UT team to obtain federal funding in that area). Besides the planning workshop activities, the PIs conducted numerous face to face meetings with engineers and executives of Mircon, Samsung, Applied Materials, Canrig Drilling Technologies, Schlubmerger, and British Petroleum (BP). All these activities led to firm commitments to memberships from Lam Research, Samsung, Texas Instruments, National Instruments and Canrig Drilling Technologies (committed to 2 memberships). In addition, one should note that soon after the workshop, Applied Materials joined the IMS Center, but through the University of Cincinnati side (University of Cincinnati and Applied Materials have just completed a collaborative project sponsored by the International Sematech Manufacturing Initiative and it is quite natural that they decided to join through the Cincinnati side). We at UT are still in intense contacts with several other companies (BP, Schlumberger, Micron, KLA-Tenkor), who may commit to joining within next several months, but at this moment are unable to provide letters of commitment. Based on levels of interests and feedback received from numerous industries we interacted with during the planning grant activities, the PIs prepared and submitted to the NSF a proposal for creation of a University of Texas site of the I-UCRC in IMS.
