ANN ARBOR, MI – January 28, 2009. The prestigious JEC Innovation Award for Innovation in Transportation Technology was presented to the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences (NCMS) Hydrogen Cylinder Manufacturing (HCM) project team this week, sharply underscoring the value of collaborative research and development in a global manufacturing marketplace. The HCM project was honored by an international panel of renowned engineering, manufacturing, R&D, and innovation experts in the Transportation category for its commercial potential, financial impact, and originality.
Formed in response to a key Department of Energy milestone, HCM addresses a crucial obstacle for the Hydrogen Economy: making high pressure hydrogen tanks economically feasible for mass production. The team’s development of a reliable high-pressure hydrogen storage tank, suitable for volume manufacture will further the possibility of commercializing alternative fuel vehicles by cutting the production cycle time for a single tank from six hours to an amazing 20 minutes. The project results indicate that further refinements will eventually cut the production cycle time to less than 10 minutes per tank.
“This is an incredible honor,” said Rick Jarman, NCMS President & CEO. “Alternative energy is a global challenge, but it’s not just as simple as finding alternative fuel sources. We have to manufacture solutions that make those sources commercially viable. It’s exhilarating to have NCMS once again recognized for managing collaborative partnerships that shatter barriers and quickly bring innovation to market.”
NCMS is no stranger to global recognition for its collaborative R&D management model: the Michigan-based non-profit has won six Defense Manufacturing Excellence Awards and five consecutive R&D 100 Awards. NCMS also administers the Robotics Technology Consortium for the Defense Department, overseeing over 100 participating companies and a budget in the hundreds of millions. Recently, another collaborative NCMS DOE project made headlines as two recently developed fuel cell stacks served as the sole source of power for an Oakland, California passenger bus for more than 130 hours over two weeks, a fantastic example of NCMS innovation taking one step closer to mass-market reality.
For HCM, NCMS brought together a strong partnership with highly complimentary skills: Profile Composites, Inc; Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America; Bayer MaterialScience, LLC; MAG Cincinnati Automation; and A&P Technology worked together to design a new manufacturing process to increase production volume. The HCM team used a resin material custom formulated by Bayer and applied it to a dry fiber preform, rather than the conventional – and slow – filament winding process of the traditional model. As a result, a new tank is ready for market eighteen times faster than filament winding, and project partners are confident that speeds can be doubled with additional improvements to the process.
“The result is a massive reduction in production costs and, suddenly, full production of these tanks is now possible,” said Mike Fancher, NCMS Program Manager for the HCM project. “In fact, we believe that these tanks could be used in commercially available vehicles that will be launched as early as this year.”
The formal presentation of the award will take place at the JEC Innovation Awards Programme 2009 at the JEC Composites Show, March 24-26, 2009, in Paris, France. This show is one of the largest in the world, with 27,000 attendees and over 1,000 exhibits.
About NCMS
The National Center for Manufacturing Sciences (NCMS) is the largest cross-industry collaborative research and development consortium in North America. It boasts a 22-year track record in the formation and management of complex, multi-partner collaborative R&D programs to deliver innovative manufacturing innovations to market – faster, more affordably, with increased ROI and reduced risk compared to traditional methods.
For more information, visit http://www.ncms.org
About JEC Group
JEC is dedicated to promoting composites internationally. It supports the development of these materials by fostering knowledge transfer and exchanges between suppliers and users. To date, the JEC network connects more than 200,000 professionals worldwide from 96 different countries. For more information, visit http://www.jeccomposites.com/