ONGOING ACTIVITIES OF THE ADVANCED MANUFACTURING CENTER

April 16, 2007

ADMINISTRATION

Jack Howell has been Center Director since the inception of AMC in January, 2005. He is going on phased retirement at the end of the present semester, and is planning on loafing, getting back to photography (a longtime hobby) and working on a fifth edition of his textbook on radiative transfer. Prof. Steve Nichols will take over direction of the Center as of May 15, 2007. Steve has previously served as Director of the Center for Energy Studies (now the Center for Environmental and Energy Research) and the Center for Electromechanics, and recently completed an assignment as UT Associate Vice President for Research. In the latter assignment, he worked to improve relations with industry on IP matters. Steve also has an interest in entrepreneurial activities and engineering ethics, and brings wide practical experience to the Center.

OUTREACH AND EDUCATION

The Option III MS degree in Advanced Manufacturing has received final approval and will be offered for the Fall semester, 2007. The degree can be earned through attending classes one weekend a month for two academic years, plus summer projects. This should be a great opportunity for our industrial affiliates to provide advanced degree support for employees without undue commitment of time away from the workplace. Full details can be accessed at the website: http://www.executivemasters.org under Advanced Manufacturing. We need to fill the initial cohort enrollment of 25 students for this program to avoid slipping the start of the program to next January, so please register immediately if this is of interest.

AMC will sponsor or cosponsor three Workshops/Conferences this academic year. The first is an informal roundtable on Change Management, and will be a forum for discussing how companies deal with unforeseen or rapid changes in the supply chain, government regulation, customer needs, etc. The workshop is cosponsored by AMC, The Center for Lifelong Engineering Education (CLEE), and Dell. It will be held on May 30, 2007 in the ME Department building, ETC.

The second is on Sustainable Manufacturing, and is co-sponsored by AMC, the Austin Chamber of Commerce, and CLEE. The meeting will bring together Austin-area and other interested manufacturing companies to discuss their interests and experiences in meeting emerging concerns on the environment, energy conservation, design for product recycling, and other factors that are shaping modern manufacturing practice. The meeting is scheduled at the PRC Commons for August 30, 2007.

The Pan-American Science Institute on Predictive Process Dynamics for Manufacturing (PPDM) was funded by the National Science Foundation. The PASI is jointly sponsored by UT (AMC lead), UC-San Diego, Los Alamos National Lab, and two South American Universities. The Institute will have two weeks of intensive study June 4-15, 2007 on how to successfully integrate physics-based modeling into advanced predictive control systems for industrial processes and plants. It will be held in Porto Alegre, Brazil. About 15 US graduate students and an equal number from South American universities plus industrial representatives will attend lectures and discussions on various aspects of PPDM, and the students will produce a roadmap for applying PPDM to general manufacturing processes. We invite industrial attendees and participation for the conference, and the web site for further information is at http://www.engr.utexas.edu/pasi/. Please contact AMC Administrative Associate Rosalie Foster if interested in attending at rosalief@mail.utexas.edu.

RESEARCH

We continue to search for support of the overall AMC mission of aiding US industry to maintain international competitiveness. Four major research thrusts are in

• small-lot and rapid-response manufacturing
• solid freeform fabrication, especially selective laser sintering
• predictive process dynamics and control optimization in manufacturing
• microscale and nanoscale manufacturing processes

Research through the Center continues to grow, and was especially augmented this year by the award of a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) Grant awarded to PI Professor Ram Manthiram for “Processing and Production Science of Next Generation Fuel Cells”.

Jack Howell

Director, Advanced Manufacturing Center