Automotive manufacturers and their suppliers are pressing to innovate in order to increase vehicle fuel efficiency to meet federal CAFÉ guidelines by integrating lightweight materials into new vehicle designs. These lightweight materials pose unique challenges and opportunities that must be addressed. The solutions for some of these challenges may be found in other industries such as aerospace and defense or in new tools and processes.
The National Center for Manufacturing Sciences (NCMS) has assembled an innovative suite of software tool providers and cross industry innovators to help manufacturers of all sizes to realize the benefits of lightweight materials while lowering costs, minimizing risk, and speeding commercialization. For the past two years NCMS has been managing the Light Weight Automotive Program (LAMP) awarded by the Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), and is administered by the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL). There are currently seven projects operating under this program. Each of these projects is leveraging the use of High Performance Computing (HPC) modeling and simulation (M&S), to support the selection and optimization of lightweight materials for their products during the product design phase. The tools developed in this NCMS program will allow companies of all sizes to use this cutting edge capability which in the past was cost prohibitive and generally not available.
For the next phase of this program, NCMS is working in partnership with the DOE to bring together 2-3 additional R&D collaborative projects to continue to accelerate development of the knowledgebase and infrastructure for lightweight materials and manufacturing processes for use in automotive applications. The objective for each project must be to develop and validate remotely accessed virtual technologies (termed Apps or Sims) leveraging existing M&S capabilities that can significantly reduce the design, development and / or manufacture of lightweight components without compromising cost, performance, safety, or recyclability. The target is to create the means for numerous small and medium sized manufactures to be able to remotely access these tools.
The goal at NCMS is to assemble cross-industry collaborative teams for each project. While some participants are not specific to automotive and others are not in automotive at all, every successful project team benefits from a broad set of eyes. Many of these challenges / benefits addressed within NCMS projects have broad applicability.
MODELING & SIMULATION ENABLEMENT REQUIREMENT
The use of M&S will be a component of each project to develop and demonstrate how these tools can reduce product design time, optimize the material and manufacturing process, reduce cost, and improve environmental sustainability. Incorporating at least one enabling mechanism granting affordable access to the supplier level will either be an explicit part of each project, or an underlying task will develop and demonstrate these tools across a selection of the projects. Once advanced M&S tools are developed, they need to be validated to assure the tools are accurate and reflect performance. Each of the projects will require validation of these tools. Finally, each project shall provide the required electronic, virtual web-based training for automotive suppliers to understand and leverage the developed tools. In parallel with NCMS’ ongoing partnership with DoE are our efforts to bring modeling and simulation capabilities to the nearly 300,000 small and medium sized manufacturers in the U.S.).
DEADLINE
The deadline for submission of project ideas is Friday, December 17, 2010 at 5 PM EST. All submissions should be sent electronically to: Jon Riley, Executive Director, Design & Engineering Programs Jon Riley, jonr@ncms.org. For more information about the required content, process, timetable or other questions please contact Jon Riley via email (above) or at 734-995-0556.
