President Barack Obama announced on June 20 that NC State will lead the southeast hub for the new Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute, which aims to catalyze economic growth in the United States by bringing academic institutions and the private sector closer together.
SMII, led by the Smart Manufacturing Leadership Coalition in partnership with the Department of Energy, will be headquartered in Los Angeles. NC State is leading one of the five hubs being launched across the U.S., which include the California regional hub led by UCLA, the Gulf Coast hub led by Texas A&M, the northeast hub led by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the northwest hub led by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
“It is an opportunity to work on the next generation of manufacturing,” said Paul Cohen, head of the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. “It gives us an ability to work with other universities, with national laboratories and most importantly with companies to be able to innovate.”
SMII will focus on developing advanced sensors and controls, data analytics, advanced predictive modeling and simulation software with the goal of reducing energy costs, according to a university press release. SMII will also work to reduce the amount of time between research on smart manufacturing techniques being published and its use in the private sector to create jobs and revenue.
The SMLC is still in the midst of contract negotiations with the Department of Energy. Cohen expects the negotiations to be finalized by the end of the year.
A White House press release noted indications of the U.S. returning to international prominence in the manufacturing sector, such as the addition of roughly 800,000 manufacturing jobs since February 2010, following a steady decline in the United States’ manufacturing sector since 2000.
“People do a lot of basic research, usually at universities, and then eventually companies want to do implementation but there’s what they call the ‘Valley of Death’ in between,” Cohen said. “So the idea of these institutes is for universities and national labs to work with companies to bridge that gap and take things that may be more basic research and figure out how to get it to a point where companies can take it and run with it.”
Cohen said that the need for this kind of initiative came from the vast amount of papers and research which may have merit on their own but which are difficult for corporations to utilize.
“Companies may not have research staff so there may be papers or work that’s going on at a university and they say ‘That’s really interesting, but we don’t really have the man-power,’” Cohen said. “Maybe there’s too much risk to take it from [the research stage] to where they’re ready to implement it, so this is an idea to bridge that gap from the fundamental work that’s been done, trying to go and take it to a point where a company can take it and run with it.”
Professor Phillip Westmoreland has been named the executive director of the hub, which will be located on Centennial Campus. Westmoreland is the former president of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and served as NC State’s representative to the SMLC where he pushed hard for NC State to take a large role in the SMII.
Westmoreland described the role that the SMII will have on campus as one of coordinating “test beds” where a team of SMII researchers works with a company to find the best solutions to their problems.
Though the SMII is still in the development stages, Westmoreland used the example of Praxair, a company based in Port Arthur, Texas, to show the potential for smart manufacturing.
“We may be working with other universities or with national labs, and then we’ll go with a company and do a very large-scale implementation,” Cohen said. “We might put in a smart manufacturing system so that rather than just run your plant, you have sensing so it takes an information technology or a computer infrastructure collect a lot of information about different processes to link them together with models to try to predict what happens and then control everything in a way that will hopefully minimize the energy footprint and minimize the cost of what you’re doing.”