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SCRA to assist in global manufacturing technology
By Shelia Watson
Contributing Writer
Preserving technical data is a problem that plagues Bob Kiggans.“There’s the question of how you preserve technical information on the things we’re building today,” said Kiggans, whose work as president of the South Carolina Research Authority’s federal sector puts him in the midst of an enormous amount of technical data every day.
“We don’t have blueprints anymore; we have 3-D models,” he said. “But how do we preserve them? Chances are the CAD format that was used to make them will go out of style in three to five years.”
Fortunately, Kiggans has a place to turn for the answers. The Intelligent Manufacturing System, an industry-led, global, collaborative research and development program established to develop the next generation of manufacturing and processing technologies, is helping to discover methods of technical data preservation.
“This is something we’ll definitely be looking at with the new initiatives IMS has coming online,” said Kiggans, who was appointed by the U.S. Department of Commerce to head the U.S. delegation to IMS.
The new initiatives Kiggans referred to are the Manufacturing Technology Platforms, a program of collaborative research and development undertaken by the five regions that make up the IMS: Korea, Switzerland, the European Union/Norway, the United States and Japan.
The program’s activities include providing a method of research that looks at work being done around the world, helping form the project consortium, networking people on a global basis, conducting forums to understand current and future manufacturing requirements and distributing the information that results from the activities.
The initiative consists of five generic manufacturing areas that identify the scope of IMS:
• Sustainable Manufacturing helps develop innovative manufacturing technologies to address worldwide resource shortages and excess environmental load.
• Energy-efficient Manufacturing improves overall efficiency and reduces the carbon footprint in energy use for manufacturing and operational processes.
• Key Technologies will yield a high impact on the next generation of manufacturing, including model-based enterprise, a type of research and development system that uses models to determine the effectiveness of the research plan before its testing in real-life scenarios, as well as other next-generation manufacturing such as nanotechnology and smart materials.
• Standards focus on manufacturing research issues that can benefit from a standardized way of doing business with shared resources and information rather than the proprietary methods most often used today.
• Educational programs support manufacturing in the future.
“These platforms are designed to bring people together,” said Kiggans. “This is true collaborative work.”
He noted that most of the initiatives are pre-competitive, meaning the different parties are not competing for contracts to do the work and are therefore more open to working cooperatively.
Kiggans explained that some of the results the IMS leadership team hopes for from the initiative are joint publications, stimulation of new collaborative research and development and global-level recommendations on the best way to set standards, skills and policy for future work.
“There’s a minimum funding amount or resource level of $1 million to participate in an initiative and a minimum duration of 12 months for an active initiative,” said Kiggans.
The funding may take the form of travel costs, costs for information dissemination, management costs, resources, facility and equipment use or other in-kind contributions.
“The leadership for IMS is moving to Switzerland, but the strategic planning team is right here,” said Kiggans. “This is quite a feather in our state’s cap. It keeps South Carolina in a front-and-center position in the high-tech manufacturing arena.”
Kiggans said the state is further recognized internationally by the appointment of Tom Kurfass, a professor of engineering at Clemson’s automotive research facility, who is heading up an education initiative.
“Tom is an integral part of the advanced education program,” Kiggans said. “His group is looking at standardized curricula (for engineering programs in colleges and universities around the world). That program will eventually allow you to get a master’s degree out of
Clemson or Switzerland, and it will be good all over the world.”
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