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Public–Private Partnerships for Technology Collaboration

TECHNOLOGY COLLABORATION IN EMERGING AREAS—A U.K. PERSPECTIVE

James Peddell, the U.K. Attaché for Defence Research and Technology, provided his perspectives on technology collaboration in emerging areas. Peddell noted that the U.K. Secretary of State for Defence was recently in Washington where he talked about the three pillars in defense. Those three pillars are capability, innovation, and partnership. Peddell added that the U.K. perspective aligns well with the Department of Defense (DoD) perspective.

Peddell is based in the British embassy. He said that both his country and the United States have faced similar challenges over the years. The United Kingdom was anticipating an election in May 2015 and at the time of the workshop it was unclear what the outcome would be. “However, there is an expectation of ongoing austerity and budgets still being tied to whomever the next government is led

by,” he explained. “We’ve gone through a significant defense transformation over the last 5 to 10 years. That’s acquisition transformation and transformation of the operational commands. Most important for us is balancing our defense budget. So having balanced the budget and cut a large number of programs we now have to look at how we move forward.”

Innovation, Peddell explained, is important in light of this: “U.K. innovation strategy is likely to come out after the next election. This is U.K. defense innovation strategy, which will not just be technology, but also translate across other areas of defense such as acquisition, people, operational concepts, and war gaming. It is not dissimilar to the defense innovation initiative.”

Peddell said that technology security is one of the key elements: “We’re being driven by similar threats, challenges, and opportunities.” Globalization of technology is a key aspect “in terms of technology being found anywhere around the world. But more importantly for us, it is no longer being driven by the defense industry or government and defense.” Peddell said that this applies both to the United Kingdom and to the United States.

Collaboration and partnerships are important to the United Kingdom, and thus the country is trying to nurture them across government, academia, industry, and international sectors. “To give you a feel for that perspective, science and technology [S&T] collaboration internationally underpins key elements for us. Interoperability and support to operations has been key over the last 5 to 10 years, both in Afghanistan and Iraq. Maintaining capability advantage is our softer term for technological superiority. We are British after all; we don’t like to say the word ‘superior’ much anymore,” he explained.

Accessing global innovation and sharing research and development (R&D) investment have become essential. Peddell said that there is also an increasing “recognition that S&T defense and partnership can support mutual prosperity.”

Over the past decades, collaboration has also changed. Previously, relationships in collaborative disciplines grew from the bottom up where researchers met and where services got together and identified joint priorities. “But there hasn’t been a government-to-government or defense-to-defense direction to say ‘these are the areas we want to collaborate on in S&T.’ So we’ve established that now,” Peddell said. “We’re developing new joint programs [and] new mechanisms.” One is the first international multidisciplinary university research initiative. “It’s jointly funded U.S. and U.K. researchers for military problems and wider engagement,” Peddell explained.

Peddell showed a graphic that demonstrated that across the breadth of all U.K. academic research, approximately 10 percent is done collaboratively with U.S. universities. Approximately 20 to 25 percent of all defense S&T in the United Kingdom is carried out collaboratively with the United States. He said that, although it is a key issue, identifying the level and direction of industrial collaboration is difficult.

In February 2014, a defense S&T communiqué was signed. It highlighted the strength of collaboration in S&T but recognized the need to enhance it. As a result the United Kingdom has established new joint activities, new mechanisms, and a strategy direction.

The United Kingdom no longer has separate Army, Navy, and Air Force laboratories. It has the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, which covers all S&T for the United Kingdom, excluding the nuclear program. One of the organizations is the Materials and Structure Technology science and technology Centre, which draws together the Materials and Structures Research across defense for all of the other areas. That is the United Kingdom’s primary vehicle for ensuring Ministry of Defence (MOD) materials and structures expertise and for developing relationships, both nationally and internationally, in government, industry, and academia. “It covers defense and security so it supports our security agencies in the United Kingdom. It looks at advanced materials and structures but also low observable materials,” said Peddell.

Whether it is maritime, air, or land, those programs have materials, platforms, and manufacturing and structures research. But they all draw on the single central program for materials and structures to be more coherent and efficient.

There are currently about 220 formal S&T collaboration agreements between the United States and the United Kingdom at any one time and a myriad of projects and activities under them. They cover the breadth of a list of collaboration activities, particularly joint programs for funding activities, information exchange, and sharing of facilities, ranges, and data.

Peddell highlighted the armor memorandum of understanding that covers all armor technologies: “We’ve estimated that over the last 10 to 15 years of the work in Afghanistan and Iraq, about 90 percent of all armor upgrades went through the U.S./U.K. cooperation program to confirm and validate that the best technology was going in to support the forces. One example that came out of that is the wonderfully titled combat codpiece, or armored underwear. This was actually developed by the United Kingdom and through the U.S./U.K. agreements, the United States bought it” and then developed a U.S. version. Peddell pointed to another example of soldiers using embedded ceramic armor, which was developed through the U.S./U.K. program that has now become the U.K. Centre of Excellence in Wales.

Peddell said that there is significant collaborative research in all aspects of submarine technology, including materials, alloys, antifouling, anticorrosion, and nuclear components. He pointed to the thin flank sonar array technology “which is really a manufacturing process that has reduced production time by approximately 90 percent.” That time savings has resulted in significant cost savings as well.

Composite materials developed jointly in the United States and the United Kingdom are now on ships and engines. Another example is biologically inspired unmanned aerial systems.

Peddell also mentioned the Defence Implications for Emerging Technologies program, which is part of the Knowledge, Information, and Futures Enterprise. “Through this program, we do a lot of horizon scanning and technology watching to identify what the emerging technologies are in the world and then assess the implications for defense,” Peddell said.

Peddell described the Five Eyes Technical Cooperation Program, which involved the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand: “We share all of the research. We share that across those five nations. And the United States shares your activity across the five.” The Five Eyes program is engaging in autonomy, the electromagnetic spectrum, advanced manufacturing, and urban environments.

The United Kingdom has identified several technologies as having significant or potential impact on defense in the future. “And some of these we will monitor, some of these we will invest in, and some of these we will take forward,” Peddell said. Nanosystems is one area that will be taken forward.

Five studies were carried out in conjunction with the Institute for Manufacturing Industry and Academia in the United Kingdom in five different areas of advanced manufacturing and materials. They were in three topic areas: metamaterials, carbon nanotubes, and additive manufacturing. Peddell showed a chart that covered carbon nanotubes, showing the number of publications by country. The United States leads in each of the areas, but the United Kingdom tied for sixth with France in carbon nanotube research. The United Kingdom is fourth in additive manufacturing and third in metamaterials. Publications were simply one example of the metrics used.

Peddell said that when it comes to metamaterials, there is a range of potential applications and opportunities in defense. Although there are many potential opportunities in carbon nanotube research, it is an area in which organizations are less likely to invest and more likely to watch the commercial world.

The United Kingdom has also created the Disruptive Capabilities Program. This increased from 5 percent and will increase to 30 percent of the U.K. S&T budget. Peddell noted that whereas the United States has the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for doing advanced technology research, the United Kingdom lacked that capability, and the Disruptive Capabilities Program is an effort to try and achieve similar goals: “I’m not saying this is DARPA, but the majority of the program was spent on trying to address today’s service requirements and we lost the funding we were placing on the longer-term, more disruptive, opportunities. So we’re trying to reverse that now and the main route is through this Disruptive Capabilities Program.”

Peddell noted that five topic areas in the Disruptive Capabilities Program are unlocking human capabilities, self-sustaining forces, creating and countering novel and cyber effects, promoting pervasive situational awareness, and generating reli-

able space. The United Kingdom has already established collaborative programs in several areas including space, big data, operational energy, and cyber. These were agreed through the communiqué that was signed in 2014. Peddell said that the program is also considering study in quantum technology, directed energy, and pseudo-satellites.

In addition to the Disruptive Capabilities Program, the United Kingdom has the Centre for Defence Enterprise, which is part of the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory. Its goal is to outreach innovation in small-to-medium enterprises and academia, “the types of organizations which would not normally engage with defense,” Peddell explained. It has open calls and focused calls. There are usually small seedling funds, comparable to U.S. small business innovative research programs.

Peddell provided some examples of outcomes from that program. One is a standoff sensing technology for chemical and biological agents in the atmosphere. Another is looking at using earplugs for headphone technologies, which also collect biometric data—similar to a smart watch but embedded into helmets. Another example is using nanoparticles to do molecular tagging—for instance, tagging certain materials and then picking them up through airport screening or other security areas.

Currently many projects are under way including embedded rechargeable power supplies, embedded sensors, integrated electronics, camouflage stealth, and mimicking biology. Peddell mentioned the “8 Great Technologies” list, which includes big data, satellites, autonomous systems, synthetic biology, regenerative medicine, agri-science (the only non-defense-related technology on the list), advanced materials, and energy storage. “These are key components to the U.K. industrial strategy, and defense is now engaging with those because there is significant non-defense funding coming from government into those areas,” Peddell explained.

In 2012, the U.K. government released a high-value manufacturing strategy. The United Kingdom has seven Catapult Centres to push specific technology areas forward. Peddell noted that the strategy was developed without defense engagement, but the MOD is “participating in refreshing that strategy and informing it using those Defence Implications for Emerging Technologies reviews” (see Figure 3.1).

In terms of military interest in advanced manufacturing, the United Kingdom is still developing its position, and a strategy is likely to be finalized in 2015. Peddell noted that there are a number of technology areas. The most significant or immediate challenge for the United Kingdom in this area is in procurement: “It’s not how do we procure it, it’s how do we know when we’re procuring it? What we’re noticing is that suppliers are starting to use additive manufacturing or other advanced manufacturing techniques in components which we’re buying.” Additive manufacturing may be used in components in aircraft “and the MOD is buying capability and equipment and we don’t know until we’ve purchased it that these

techniques have been used, and we don’t know how to service them and we aren’t able to verify or validate them,” Peddell explained. “We effectively are recognizing we’re behind the curve on it. Industry is ahead in utilizing these capabilities and we need to understand them better as we move forward.”

A workshop participant noted that over many years a lot of technology has been transferred between the two countries. An example is the armor on the M1 Abrams tank, which came out of the United Kingdom many years ago and is still in use. He asked whether the technology transfer and cooperation is at a level where it should be. Peddell mentioned that, going back to WWII, there has been a lot of sharing in areas such as radar, electronics, and so on. “Where I think we are is on a continuing slight gradient upwards in terms of the amount of cooperation over time. It’s a difficult time to ask the question because over the last 10 years the amount of cooperation increased significantly because we were effectively on a war footing,” Peddell replied. “The problem was all of that cooperation, albeit S&T, was based on immediate operational requirements.” An example was the armor memorandum of understanding, which “has increased tenfold in terms of the amount of activity and cooperation we’ve done on armor which goes all the way from materials to human factors.”

The next step is to decide what the future areas of technology development are so that they can start cooperating at the early stage again. “In the United Kingdom, we use the term that we’ve used up everything we’ve got on the shelf. We spent the last 20 to 25 years developing technology and we used it up over the last 10 years of war. We now need to restock the shelves. And we need to do that together,” Peddell said.

Another workshop participant asked about the mechanisms that the university centers and the Catapult operation use to share information and work together. Peddell said that it is a developing picture “but what I have seen is a number of Catapult Centres are based around universities, and include a number of universities, so there will be overlaps between the Research Council-funded activity and the central government-funded industry cooperative activity through the Catapults.” He added that there are a number of groupings that have grown around specific industry areas. The Catapult Centres and university centers are working together and have created their own titles for a number of these organizations that work together.

Another participant noted that Peddell said that the United Kingdom is still suffering from austerity measures. He asked Peddell whether trends are beginning to shift and, if not, whether there is a timeframe for these changes to have a significant impact.

Peddell said that there is significant growth in government investment in certain areas. He said, “It seems like every other month there’s a few hundred million being announced against one of those centers or through the Research Council. So whilst there’s a period of austerity, the government has chosen where it’s going to focus its investment and enhanced its investment in a number of areas.” The advanced manufacturing materials sector in the United Kingdom is one of the important ones, he added.

On the defense S&T side, Peddell said that, to date, S&T has been somewhat protected “so we haven’t seen the reductions that have taken place across other areas of defense. The investment in S&T and these emerging product service business areas are actually seeing an enhancement or being protected during this period. The hope is that investing in these areas would turn around other areas of the economy.”

Another participant asked what this situation might look like from a European perspective. Peddell replied that from a defense perspective, the MOD has an international collaboration strategy with four main pillars, two of which are bilateral priorities: the United States being “primus inter pares,” the primary one, and France being the second. There are also the two multilateral ones, for the Five Eyes and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). From a defense perspective there is United Kingdom/France and there is NATO in terms of European engagement. There is a range of other bilateral and multilateral arrangements.

Peddell said that he was less familiar with the European frameworks’ Horizon 2020 effort. But it is just as significant, if not more in some cases. In terms of things

like the European defense agency and, to a certain extent, NATO S&T, the United Kingdom is more likely to engage bilaterally with the United States and then feed that through to NATO and other areas because the benefit is more equitable.

THE IMS NETWORK AND HOW IT OPERATES

The next speakers were Dan Nagy, David Romero, and Steve Ray, of a global consortium called Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (IMS). Nagy is the managing director of the IMS Secretariat, David Romero represents the Mexico region, and Steve Ray represents the United States.

Nagy explained that IMS has been around since 1995. He said, “We’re an international network. And we like to say we’re an industry-led R&D program. We do have government involved and are government-supported.” Nagy said that he was not selling memberships in IMS: “You’re already all members thanks to your governments.”

IMS has a lot of experience putting together collaborations, Nagy explained. “Our collaborations can include any mix of academia, industry, or government institutions. We’ve put them all together. Whatever the requirements are, we try to find the right partners to put these consortiums together.”

In the United States, IMS is supported through the Department of Commerce and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In Mexico, it is supported through the Consejo Nacional de Ciencias y Tecnología, which translates to the National Council for Science and Technology. In Europe, it is supported through the Director General for Research on the manufacturing side and the Directorate General for Communication Networks, Content, and Technology. In the past week, IMS added South Africa and is currently in the process of establishing a regional secretariat in South Africa.

IMS starts with a Terms of Reference agreement among all of the participating governments. Nagy pointed out that in the European Union, 28 countries have to sign, which is not always easy. “It’s like a mini United Nations for manufacturing,” he said. “The important thing about this Terms of Reference is there are clauses in there about IP protection. We’re very careful about who comes into the organization and their respect for intellectual property [IP]. If you don’t have that basic understanding, respect, and agreements from your players that you’re going to respect IP, collaborations are very difficult to put together,” Nagy explained.

Nagy referred to the World Manufacturing Forum, which he said has been highly successful. He added that there are currently more than 1,400 companies involved in IMS. The collaborations can result from top-down requirements from governments such as pressure for energy efficiency and in how materials are handled. But they can also be bottom-up collaborations that result from industry itself saying that it needs to become more efficient or more competitive.

Nagy said that IMS sent a survey to approximately 1,500 companies and asked them how much of their IP is crucial to their businesses, which differentiates their products and makes their companies unique. The companies responded that about 20 percent of their IP was essential. “From our perspective, 80 percent of it probably can be shared or put into a collaborative-type project,” he added.

The types of projects that IMS puts together are varied. It can put together a brand new project from the bottom up or link projects. Nagy said that there are examples where someone has come to IMS with a project idea, and it found another one running with some work packages that overlapped. So IMS suggested linking some of the work packages and saving both project consortiums money.

Standards projects work very well, Nagy said. Partners determine how the IP should be shared, depending on the type of project. Sometimes the projects are completely in the public domain, and sometimes portions of the IP need to be worked out.

IMS provides coaching services to help put the projects together. The coaches are experienced individuals who know how to administer the collaborations. They can assess the situation and help the organizations. “So if you come to us with an idea, we will broker your project through our network. We’ll try to find appropriate partners for you and suggest them. Your government is paying for us to do this for you. So we’re just here to tell you about the service we’re offering,” Nagy described.

IMS does have some requirements. It is looking for an international project, so it wants to have three of the IMS regions involved in the projects. “And we’re looking for projects that are significant. We’re looking at $1,000,000 in commitment. . . . This can be your laboratory, your time, all of these things combined. If you have a consortium of a number of people, you divide that out, you can see it’s not a huge commitment on an individual institution,” Nagy explained.

IMS also wants at least a 2-year project. Three or 6 months is not considered significant. IMS requires only a two-page submission. “We don’t want this process to be onerous,” Nagy said. “We understand that if you’re running a project you’ve got your own paperwork that you’re doing and your objectives, your work packages, and so on. You don’t need to resubmit that to us. We’re just looking for a simple memorandum of agreement to be signed that tells us ‘yes we have these partners, yes these partners have agreed to work together.’”

IMS also offers workshops so that parties can present their project ideas. If they have a nascent project that they are thinking about, they can attend one of the workshops. If there is enough interest in one topic, IMS can even create a theme around it.

The platforms that IMS is working in include sustainable manufacturing and safety, energy efficiency, key technology, standards and interoperability, and education and training. Nagy admitted that the categories are quite broad and almost anything can fit into them as long as the topic deals with manufacturing.

The World Manufacturing Forum¹ stems from a meeting several years ago in Switzerland. Both the World Economic Forum and the economic crisis were occurring. IMS realized that it did not have a global forum focused on manufacturing and decided to create one. IMS has now had three iterations, with the last one in Milan. “What we’re doing is we’re bringing experts in to talk about the issues of manufacturing and really trying to highlight those problems and bring them to our audience,” Nagy said. He characterized the audience as decision makers in manufacturing in both government and industry. IMS hopes that this might bleed through on the R&D side. The forum is an invitation-only event “because we really do want people in there that can influence the direction of manufacturing,” he explained.

Nagy mentioned some of the people who attended the recent forum, including Mauro Piloni, President of Whirlpool in Europe; Bob Kiggans, who is the IMS chair and serves on the board at South Carolina Research Authority; Dean Bartles, who recently opened one of the new innovation centers; Dianne Chong from Boeing; Anton Huber, chief executive officer at the Automation Division at Siemens; Rich Jarman from the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences; and Mike Lemon from International Techne Group Incorporated.

The topics included robotics for subject matter experts, cybersecurity, global standards, and several others. “We want people to know that IMS [is] behind the World Manufacturing Forum, but we don’t want to be exclusive to regions of the world that are not members of the organization,”² Nagy explained.

“We understand how important the network is and we’re always looking to expand our network as well. This is a new network for us and we know that not any one network has the answer. So the more networks that you can plug in to the better it is for getting quality research and the answers that you need,” Nagy added. “Collaboration is essential but it’s not easy to do and again, we know that, we have experience, and we can help.” He finished by adding that IMS has probably been involved in nearly $700 million in research spread across its many projects.

EXAMPLES OF IMS COLLABORATIVE PROJECTS

Romero and Ray then addressed the group about IMS collaborative projects. Ray reiterated that IMS does not earn income from the actual collaborations themselves. Once the collaboration is under way, IMS steps back and lets the partners carry on.

Ray said that a lot of the projects emanate from European Commission funding. “The whole Framework Seven or Horizon 2020 program has been very instru-

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¹ The website for the forum is www.worldmanufacturingforum.org, accessed March 1, 2018.

²IMS.org covers research and development.

mental,” he said. “In fact, they’ve earmarked some of their funds in the past to emphasize IMS collaborations. If you came forward to the European Commission on one of these programs with a project idea that fit the IMS requirements, they actually gave you extra consideration. So there was a lot of interest in Europe for jumping in IMS and getting funded for it out of the European Commission.”

The Consumer Services for Global Production Networks addressed a problem of global supply chains in manufacturing and because of that it was helpful to the project to have participants from different parts of the world, Ray explained. It focused on the fact that supply chains today have to be dynamic and adaptive to changing conditions. If, for instance, a border gets closed or a plant goes down, the supply chain has to have redundancy and resiliency.

There has been an attempt to encode most of the knowledge and the constraints behind attributes of different suppliers in a supply chain network so as to automate some of the optimization decisions. When something changed quickly, it would allow a user to employ artificial intelligence techniques and ontologies to quickly reconfigure the supply chain network in light of many complex influences such as legal, environmental, technological, and social issues. The goal of the project was to investigate the feasibility of encoding all of those different factors: press a button and essentially come up with some optimal suggestions in light of changing conditions.

Ray said that although the project originated in Europe, one essential element was a U.S. partner, Highfleet. That was an integral part of the project’s success. Highfleet provided the funding itself as opposed to securing European Commission funding. Ray explained that it is difficult for a U.S. organization to get funding from the European Commission. “They felt it would help them advance their own technology. Try it out in a new setting and get exposure to other potential markets as well as Europe, so they were willing to do that on their own dime,” Ray explained.

Ray mentioned another project, Virtual Simulation and Training (VISTRA) of Assembly and Service Processes in Digital Factories, which addressed the issue of training in manufacturing, particularly discrete manufacturing. “The essence of the idea was that people are seeing some of the advantages of immersive training environments where you interact in a virtual setting to get trained on say, assembly operations. But it is very labor intensive to put these environments together,” Ray said.

The basic idea of VISTRA was to take many of the data that are digitized in a manufacturing facility, such as product, facility, and production data, and harvest them and put them into a system that will create the first draft of an immersive environment. It would have the correct geometries and essentially automate assembling the training environment.

VISTRA came out of Germany, funded by the European Commission. “They present settings where you can use motion-sensing input devices. You can move

things around. You can see some of the tools and things were just pulled out of the already existent data that was in their systems to allow them to do that,” Ray explained. He said that one of the advantages is that one could train assembly workers in parallel to building the assembly line. Metalsa is a major chassis manufacturer in Mexico that supplies most of the automotive companies in the United States. It put the VISTRA technology on its lines. General Motors did the same with an automotive plant.

Romero noted that IMS was surprised to see this project “because in basically 3 years they were able to automatically generate this training sequence from existing data and the enterprise information systems. For example, with Metalsa they were able to train for welding processes and learn how to do the welding sequence.”

He added that universities have to reduce their physical facilities, and digital technology is making it much cheaper to provide this kind of interactive virtual reality experience to the students. It allows them to interact with the real production line without the hazards of sending them directly to a machine tool.

Ray explained that, like a number of other IMS projects, there was a spinoff company that actually commercializes and supports this kind of technology now. He added that originally it was just supposed to be training the assembly sequence but has become more sophisticated. “And then the fancy version has actual body tracking and things. They can actually evaluate ergonomic behavior,” which enables the trainer to determine whether someone is doing a process incorrectly, Ray added.

Romero discussed a project called Product Lifecycle Management and Information Tracking using Smart Embedded Systems (PROMISE) that was started in 2004. “It has been one of the largest projects that we’ve had,” Romero said. It includes 3 Swiss, 16 European, 7 Japanese, 3 American, and 3 Australian partners. The project started with radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology that was just beginning to mature. It looked at the technology at the precompetitive level and evaluated the business model possibilities for middle or end-of-life product cycle phases.

PROMISE has been one of the most complex collaborations that IMS has managed because of the distribution, number, and mix of partners, as well as technology providers, university research providers, and demonstrators such as Bombardier, which was one of the strongest adopters of the technology at the pre-stage.

IMS was looking at the possibilities for using the smart product embedded information devices, creating a kind of product avatar or digital shadow of the product, and then following it across the whole life cycle. IMS wondered if the devices could capture all the information that was stored in the product at the end-of-life cycle and recycle it into the design of the next-generation product.

IMS also considered how to design better maintenance services in general during the middle-of-life cycle. Between 2004 and 2008 IMS was just starting to

explore the possibilities of RFID tags and other tagging technologies. It wanted to discover the potential use of all this information that was lacking because of the information gaps beyond the beginning of the life cycle to product.

The project focused on first developing smart product embedded information devices, some kind of first-generation advanced RFID tags, and then building the system that would aggregate all the data. The most important aspect was the decision support system and knowledge management tools to enable exploitation of the information.

The technology has to be combined with the right business model to have return of investment over R&D efforts. “So they were also looking [at] and exploring new business models on how to reuse and use this information, now being able to collect it,” Romero explained. There was some focus on trying to reduce total cost of design and manufacturing by closing the information loop, increasing competitive advantage, improving supply chain efficiency, lowering cost of ownership and increasing its asset utilization, and reducing environmental pressures by being able to better control the information produced across the whole life cycle.

After 4 years of working on the project, there was a spinout company founded in 2008 called Closed Loop Lifecycle Management, Romero said. It was an R&D project that eventually transformed into a company. Romero said that now the company is bringing together all the partners to think of the next generation of smart embedded systems for products.

Nagy mentioned the IMS 2020 project; it cost €4 million to map R&D from around the world to IMS. It “was quite a gift to the organization, and the Horizon 2020 program actually is a follow on to the IMS 2020 Roadmap,” Nagy said, noting that it indicates good connections between IMS and the European Commission.

Romero referred to another project, Development of Adaptive Production systems for Eco-efficient firing processes (DAPhNE). It is an industry-led project (in the sectors of ceramics, glass, and cement), whereas PROMISE started out more as a technology and university project. It was a multisector collaboration project, focused on developing better process technology. Currently most of the material is created through oven-based firing processes, and Romero noted that it is difficult to control temperature with extremely energy-intensive industrial ovens. So the project was looking into microwave technologies to better control the process.

In this case three different materials of interest used a common process. Romero said that it was easy to unite these companies and jointly invest in developing that technology. The focus was on developing smart control systems and an alternative for firing technologies. DAPhNE looked at microwave technologies and decided it wanted to have better control of the energy consumption. DAPhNE developed not only a better process based on microwaves to better treat and reduce the energy cost related to materials, but also life cycle assessment and energy management systems around the process to reduce both the energy cost and the time of the process.

Romero said that in the past it was extremely costly to turn on the oven, wait for the oven to heat, and start the process. If issues arose with the industrial oven, restarting it could be onerous and time-consuming. Microwave technology has allowed these companies to drastically reduce their energy costs.

Ray added that the companies indicated they normally left electrically heated ovens on all weekend because it took too long to cool down and ramp up again. Now, with microwave technology, they shut them off on the weekends and restart them on Monday, saving 2 days’ worth of energy. The change in technology also resulted in better additives, additions, pretreatment mixes, and formulations. As a result of that, there was a possibility to expand the types of products that they were developing.

Ray mentioned another project called Sustainable and Efficient Production of Lightweight Solutions, with an objective to develop aluminum alloys that can be recycled for reuse in structural automotive components. The project was investigating new industrial models for sustainable, lightweight solutions. It was looking into how to achieve 75 percent recycling in high-end structural components, as well as product and process optimization with up to a 50 percent goal of increased weight performance ratio. Ultimately, the project was looking for a holistic life cycle view of aluminum recycling.

Ray added that even though the United States was not a participant in the last two projects, the technology is available through IMS. It can be harvested, taking advantage of European money or other countries’ investments that can then be leveraged.

Romero noted that Photopolymer-based Customized Additive Manufacturing Technologies (PHOCAM) had a spinoff company, which is another indicator that many of the R&D projects transform into companies and that IMS is serving industry. “It’s not just a bunch of academics trying to do our projects that we brought to brainstorming sessions and so on, but actually talking with industry and trying to create solutions for them,” Romero said. PHOCAM wanted to develop lithography-based additive manufacturing and so developed some machines and patents. Ray added that this is not technically lithography but is light-emitting diode-based.

Ray mentioned the steel industry: “The manufacturers were worried that some of the performance predictions for these advanced alloys and things were getting so complicated that some of their customers” were abandoning them “because it was getting too hard to know whether this new alloy was going to do their job.” Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and Imperial College in London had two professors with different approaches to greatly simplifying the algorithms for predicting steel performance. They caught industry’s attention with their project, Simple Tools Sell Steel. Romero talked about some U.S.-led projects, such as Integrated Product Life Cycle Management Archiving: Implementation of Long-Term Archiving and

Retrieval Systems for Digital Product Data Management and Product Life Cycle Management Data. As industry has moved away from Mylar or paper-based designs and blueprints to 3D systems that are entirely digital, archiving has become much more difficult because it is not possible to store the sheets in a desert warehouse somewhere for 50 years. “Now you’ve got to worry about the fact that not only the physical media for storage, which is sometimes easier, but the operating system that you ran your computer-aided design system on—the computer-aided design system itself—is either out of business or five versions earlier. How do you even interpret the information anymore?” Romero asked. “Are you ever going to read your WordStar file that you have on an 8-inch floppy 20 years from now? Good luck. So that’s a big problem, a problem not only in aerospace of course but in automotive as well. We found that the automotive sector, through the Automotive Industry Action Group, and the aerospace sector, through this project called Lotar, were both working the same problem in different but complementary ways.” The aerospace actors, focusing on representation, and the automotive actors, focusing on both the archiving process and the retrieval process, were brought together under IMS.

Ray said that he contacts additive manufacturing companies and asks them about the problems that keep them up at night: “A couple themes emerged. One was in selective laser sintering; the metal powders that are used for additive, the properties of those powders are still not well understood. It’s hard to know how to characterize them. There have been some standardization efforts.”

Ray noted that companies such as General Electric are realizing tremendous weight savings with additive manufacturing, up to 85 percent savings on some of their components. “So I put together a little white paper and we’re floating it right now among these guys, saying how about if we had a project which would take some of these databases that are coming up right now on metal powder properties and combine that with some of these state-of-the-art algorithms coming out of the ESI group on property prediction, so that we can actually predict pretty well what the behavior, what the strength of the materials is going to be on these additive components,” Ray said. IMS is putting that idea out there, hoping people will cluster around the idea and sign up, and then IMS will help them launch it, step back, and let them do their work.

A participant noted that back when IMS was started in the mid-1990s, many major North American globalized companies would not join. The U.S. government was not contributing funds. “You’ve done something right to survive for 20 years,” the workshop participant added. He asked about what changes IMS had to make to adapt to the marketplace and meet the needs of the globalized audience.

Nagy replied that every few years IMS goes through a self-assessment. There is an independent panel right now assessing IMS to try to keep it current. When it first started, IMS had very difficult requirements for starting a project. It had a

consortium cooperation agreement that needed to be signed. It required full project proposals that were 30–60 pages long. It had a 2-year review process, so it was very difficult to get a project going, and during one of the self-assessments, IMS invited industry to describe how it wanted to set up a project.

The result of that was the Manufacturing Technology Platform Program. “So if you want to get an idea, you want to float an idea and you want to get partners together, this is very simple and there’s no heavy document to sign and get through your legal departments and so on,” Nagy said. “It’s just a simple agreement. ‘We’re going to work together.’ And that’s it. It’s two pages.”

The other area is services, providing coaching for small and medium enterprises that need someone to help facilitate their entrance into a project. The third part of the World Manufacturing Forum is to raise awareness of issues in manufacturing and bring together people who can make changes with leaders in manufacturing at a high level to exchange ideas.

Another participant asked about core funding from the governments and their organizational capacity. Nagy said that every region funds itself. The money that IMS receives from governments is just for administrative costs. Each region funds its own participation. In the European Union, two departments do this. IMS has regional secretariats and a development coach. But IMS also has access to other people, such as those in the European Factories of the Future Research Association, which serves as an advisory body. He said that it is difficult to count heads at the networks, and it is better to look at results. NIST funds $250,000 per year. It is a very small number, which also makes it attractive from a government standpoint. The core set of people for each region is about four to five.

A participant asked when once a project is approved with enough partners to achieve critical mass, what are the rules of engagement of these partners? How do they get the work done? How often do they meet? Who leads the project? Does every partner send a representative?

Romero responded that during the year IMS normally organizes two or three workshop events as well as the World Manufacturing Forum. Some projects have their kickoff meetings as part of events like the World Manufacturing Forum and then meet every 6 months.

Nagy added that each project needs a participant to champion the cause and organize meetings. He also said that when IMS holds the workshops, it also extends an invitation to the running projects so that if they want to attend the workshop, IMS will also provide a meeting room for them.

A participant noted that IMS has a commercial culture and commercial processes. He asked whether that makes it allergic to defense participation. Nagy replied that it does not necessarily rule out defense: “I think that we would run into issues if we were asked to be involved with doing a weapons project. But what I heard yesterday was that the kinds of projects that are happening are common

issues within manufacturing and those kinds of projects certainly affect all types of manufacturing. So I don’t see an issue.”

Kiggans added, “We wouldn’t be involved in a project to build the next bomb. No one would do that. But like they said, a lot of these process-style projects relate to both defense and commercial manufacturing. But anything that has to do with weapons and stuff like that from a defense standpoint, we wouldn’t be involved in.”

Romero added that “most of the time we’re not talking about any specific product. We’re talking about developing a specific enabling technology or a specific next-generation processing technology. Then every industry, every partner can do with that technology or with that processing technology what is better for their specific problems.”

Nagy noted, “It takes a lot of volunteers. There are a lot of people that are involved with IMS that love the organization because they want to further manufacturing science. We have a lot of people that are involved that do work with IMS that help us out that are doing it just because we’re a nonprofit organization. They see our mission. They’ve seen our results. And they want to get involved just because they love it and it’s interesting and they want to be part of the community.”

THE NATIONAL NETWORK FOR MANUFACTURING INNOVATION CENTERS—WHERE DOES INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION FIT?

Johnnie DeLoach of the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock Division, was the next speaker. He leads the materials division but is also a detailee under Julie Christodoulou at the Office of Naval Research (ONR) Code 332. His primary assignment as a detailee is to act as the government program manager for the Lightweight Metals Institute, which is now called Lightweight Innovations for Tomorrow (LIFT).

DeLoach described the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation (NNMI), which grew out of the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership. The goal of the partnership was to implement a major initiative to increase U.S. competitiveness and technological dominance in advanced manufacturing. These are public–private collaborations, with a goal of focusing on what is commonly referred to as “the valley of death,” meaning manufacturing readiness level range of four to seven. The plan is to reduce the risk and also provide a mechanism to advance some of the early 6.1 and 6.2 type work so that it is ready for implementation.

Training and workforce development is a huge part of the partnership’s effort because technology alone is not going to lead to manufacturing dominance or economic improvement. A capable domestic workforce better equipped to apply and execute today’s technologies could help fill the gaps that currently exist in some areas.

A network of shared facilities serves as a place where industry, government, and academia can work together. A key milestone in this effort came about in December

2014 when President Obama signed the Revitalize American Manufacturing Innovation Act into law, which authorized the Department of Commerce to allocate money toward the concept of NNMI.

The institutes include LIFT, which is headquartered in Detroit; America Makes, which is the Additive Manufacturing Institute in Youngstown, Ohio; Power America (working on the wideband gap), which is at North Carolina State University; the Digital Manufacturing and Design Institute, headquartered in Chicago; and the Advanced Composites Manufacturing Institute in Tennessee.

There are also a couple of future institutes. With regards to LIFT, the lead for all of the institutes has to be a nonprofit 501(c)(3). Edison Welding Institute, Ohio State University, and University of Michigan united to form a new nonprofit called American Lightweight Materials Manufacturing Innovation Institute (ALMMII). ALMMII’s focus is on lightweight metals manufacturing, and its purview includes commercialization, final product commercialization, and the technology advancement bridge between basic research and commercialization. Promoting American competitiveness and developing a more agile and capable workforce are also goals. “We want to be basically the U.S. and world leader in lightweight metals manufacturing technologies and the provider of choice,” DeLoach said. It was launched on February 25, 2014, although the headquarters officially opened on January 15, 2014. It serves the Interstate-75 Corridor’s five-state region: Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee. All of the institutes are designed to have a regional focus but seek to have national relevance.

ALMMII currently has 105 members. Membership has grown substantially since the proposal stage and continues to expand, including 68 industrial members, 20 universities, and 13 miscellaneous organizations spread across 24 states. The federal government contribution is $70 million over 5 years. There is a requirement for a one-to-one cost match of nongovernment funds, and to date ALMMII has received commitments totaling $78 million—$25 million in cash and $53 million in kind. The predominance of the $70 million comes through defense manufacturing, with ONR executing the cooperative agreement and serving as lead.

ALMMII’s major focus is to apply integrated computational materials engineering concepts with the goal of increasing the speed to market on some items. Every one of its projects will have an integrated computational materials engineering component.

ALMMII has tier one members who contribute $350,000 a year, with $100,000 minimum in cash. Anything beyond that amount demonstrates the benefit of the government cost share. ALMMII also has quite a few small and medium enterprises, defined as having fewer than 500 employees. It defines companies with less than 50 employees as start-ups.

DeLoach described the vertical pillars of ALMMII’s research: melt processing, powder processing, thermal mechanical processing, novel and agile processing (also

defined as advanced tooling or adjunct tooling), coatings, and joining and assembly. For each of the verticals, ALMMII also has crosscutting pillars. These include integrated computational materials engineering, design, life cycle analysis, validation, and certification. The latter can also include qualification, cost modeling, and supply chain issues. In addition, there are two defense-influenced items: corrosion and ballistic and blast.

DeLoach then addressed the subject of foreign engagement in the institutes. He reiterated that the purpose of the institutes is to enhance U.S. competitiveness and enhance American capability in advanced manufacturing.

Each of the institutes has a requirement to be self-sustaining (i.e., operational without federal funds) at the end of their cooperative agreement of 5 years. They can pursue additional federal funding on a competitive basis, but the guaranteed federal funding will end at the conclusion of the cooperative agreement.

DeLoach said that ALMMII has already gone through a complex ideation process in which it down-selected to its first set of approved project topics. Twelve were approved, three of which would launch soon—two of them on thin wall castings and one on aluminum to steel hybrid structures. The remainder would start over the next few months.

“Anything that comes out of these institutes should ideally be used and taken advantage of in the United States,” DeLoach emphasized. “And if not only in the United States, certainly first in the United States. We should be able to take full advantage of it first before it goes elsewhere. That’s the overarching spirit of it. That is in drastic opposition to some of the things discussed here. And that is our conundrum.”

DeLoach displayed some text that provided the definition of a foreign firm or institution including that it exists under laws of some other country, and it is owned or controlled by a foreign government, firm, institute, or individual. Even if it is organized and exists under the laws of the United States, if it is controlled substantively by a foreign entity then by definition it is a foreign entity.

There are also restrictions on the sale or transfer of technology. A transfer to a U.S. incorporated company that is owned by a foreign government is not restricted. If the foreign entity is an approved source or supply for the conduct of research and it is defined as such within the agreement, that is also acceptable.

According to DeLoach, most companies join because there is some value proposition that is attractive to them, and they are trying to make money. Being able to move information freely is important to them. They want to know how a multinational corporation can transfer technology to a subsidiary. They want to know whether they are allowed to transfer the technology to a U.S. company with a foreign subsidiary. DeLoach said that the same question applies for a partially owned foreign subsidiary. There are some major U.S. companies that are actually subsidiaries of foreign companies. The problem, DeLoach said, is that there are

broad definitions about who can participate based upon foreign involvement, but the realities can be far more complex.

Another issue is that ALMMII has different rules, or slightly different application of rules, across institutes. It has major companies that want to be members of multiple institutes, but “they see rule set A with institute one and rule set B with institute two and that’s a problem right now. We’re struggling with how to get through that,” DeLoach said.

If ALMMII accepts a company with certain requirements such as firewalls, how does it conduct the vetting process? Enforcing the rules is also something ALMMII is trying to address: “The final thing that we’re grappling with gets back to what I mentioned a little bit earlier and that’s standardization across the institutes—can we really do it?” Right now the institutes have the flexibility to look at things on a case-by-case basis and do what is best for the institute in a particular technology area.

DeLoach said that the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute is currently facing the biggest issues and is therefore drafting some guidance, which could then be adopted across other institutes. The Department of Energy’s Advanced Manufacturing National Program Office, the Department of Commerce, and the NNMI are also addressing their issues in parallel because they also involve the Department of Energy and DoD. “And within DoD, the Army has different council than Navy and Air Force,” DeLoach added. “It’s a pretty complex issue.” As a result, it is a key topic on ALMMII’s agenda.

MATERIALS ENABLE DEFENSE SYSTEMS YESTERDAY, TODAY, AND TOMORROW: A REVIEW OF MATERIALS AND MANUFACTURING EVOLUTION

Tom Bayha talked about materials for defense and his company Allegheny Technologies Incorporated (ATI), where he is the director of R&D at a facility in Monroe, North Carolina. Allegheny Technologies is roughly a $5.5 billion in sales company, based in Pittsburgh. It manufactures roughly 90 million lb of high-performance aerospace materials each year. These are primarily titanium alloys, specialty steel, nickel-based superalloys, and similar materials, and ATI also makes powdered materials from many of those metals.

Bayha said that his company has a positive attitude toward R&D. “We call it an expenditure,” he said, “and I like to call it that because if I call it a losing proposition my bosses would probably not need me any longer.”

ATI’s portfolio of projects is set by a defined business case that shows the benefit to the company in some sort of revenue generation or cost savings. Bayha said that it does a small portion of work in 6.1 and 6.2 basic R&D. The company has membership with some consortia, but it does not rely on universities and

other support institutions as much as some of the other companies mentioned at the workshop.

The company is distributed across the country. It has four areas or facilities for R&D in the United States. Bayha’s base conducts primary melting for nickel-based materials and titanium materials. The company also has a facility in Oregon that works with exotic metals, which Bayha described as hafnium and zirconium-type materials. These are usually for Department of Energy requirements in the nuclear industry. The company also has research facilities outside of Pittsburgh that support its flat roll division, producing stainless steels and superalloys. Finally, it has another R&D facility outside of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in its Cudahy Division. This facility is a forging parts manufacturer that performs modeling and R&D work.

Bayha stressed that the centers are not independent of each other and that they collaborate within the company. He said that there is also a lot of collaboration in his group between the powder metals facility, which is outside of Pittsburgh, and his new state-of-the-art forging facility. Bayha said that ATI is a global company, but most of the global aspects involve distribution and sales. The majority of its manufacturing is done domestically and supports the defense industry. “A lot of the materials we make do have restrictions on them, on how much processing technology you can share, even within our company overseas,” he explained. So the fact that production and technology for the products is in the United States is by design.

According to Bayha, ATI makes a broad-based list of materials, including nickel-based superalloys, specialty and stainless steels, and heavy alloys such as tungsten and hafnium. It makes them in a broad-breadth product form: “ATI has been working hard to generate a product portfolio that crosses the breadth of aerospace in particular, oil and gas, biomedical, so forth.”

Bayha said that his area of the company makes long product forms and billet products. Some of these can be quite large, “anywhere from 4-inch to really big sizes like 25-26 inch-type materials. We forge bar, we make shapes of all different sizes and kinds on our 100-year-old hand mill that we have. We do extrusions, tubing, you name it.” This includes hydraulic tubing for aircraft. The company also makes everything from plates 4 or 5 inches in thickness down to coils of foil on the order of three thousandths of an inch thick of high-performance titanium alloys and steels.

Bayha noted that ATI utilizes a lot of basic research tools, especially at universities with good microscope facilities. When the company needs some kind of characterization done, ATI will tap into the knowledge and expertise of specialists: “We have quite a lot of little service contracts where we can go in and say ‘I’ve got to have this done by the weekend.’” Bayha said that while that work does not support students, the company has other programs that engage directly with students.

Bayha’s job is to develop new products for the company as well as new processes to help make those products in a profitable, marketable fashion. The company does

a lot of process modeling, which Bayha described as the future of the industry. Bayha explained that ATI has a model for just about every process in the company, approximately 18 of them. “These are not in the best condition. They don’t describe every process for us completely, and we’re always working on them and updating them,” Bayha stressed.

Bayha said that one of his jobs is to look at ways that ATI can change its approach, innovate, and improve methods to obtain more cost savings. He said that a customer might specify a new alloy, and the company’s task is to identify an affordable manufacturing pathway.

Bayha noted that the company has a dozen Ph.D.’s in various disciplines who are “on-call basically 24 hours a day to support our operations and technology department with hard questions that operations may have.” For instance, someone may need an expert opinion on material degradation after extended heat treatment (e.g., leaving it in the furnace too long) because it may be unusable to the customer. Those experts will run a model to determine whether the material is still functional and meets standards.

Bayha referred to working in specialty materials, which have unusual qualities. “They’ve got a balance of properties,” he explained. “If you change one then you change the other, usually at the expense of each other.” Generally, these high-performance materials need high strength and low density. “You need to have oxidation and corrosion resistance on these materials, far and beyond what a layer of paint may provide,” he explained.

ATI’s top line includes new products to be released in 2015–2016, all of which are currently aerospace-related. He noted a titanium material for the backs of engine nacelles capable of dealing with the hot exhaust. He also referred to another material for landing gear applications. Another material is an alpha beta titanium alloy that can be processed at much lower temperatures. That innovation can save tool life and time in the shops. “When we get into things like process development, we’re looking at really, really specialized processes. We don’t just light the material with a match and melt it. We use plasma arc melting and electron beam melting in our titanium facilities which are really high-performance melt capabilities,” Bayha explained.

The processes the company works on are designed to eliminate defects in aerospace materials and to ensure that materials perform as expected. A brand new facility with a state-of-the-art 10,000-ton press is developing nickel-based materials that historically have been made via powder metallurgy and extrusion. ATI now makes them via powder metallurgy and then wrought processing the billet.

According to Bayha, the company has a technology readiness level system. It only goes up to five levels, and the fifth level is full production. “Technology Readiness Level-1 is the idea that the R&D engineer has,” Bayha continued.

He explained that ATI works extensively with crack sensitive materials, such as nickel-based materials, which create safety concerns: “So we do a lot of work in our

pilot facility to come up with the protocols for the shop to make these materials in a safe manner for the employees.”

The company is also involved with some university research efforts. Many of these are service agreements, but there are several basic projects in titanium alloys and some powder metals. The company is involved in several consortia, such as the Metals Affordability Initiative. The company is part of a new center for nonferrous materials that is coordinating the faculty expertise from the University of North Texas and Colorado School of Mines. It is also part of the Center for Additive Manufacturing at North Carolina State University.

ATI is working on a broad number of materials in aerospace, primary structure, and engine bay materials. It is also researching materials for fasteners, brackets, and several other applications. Many different materials go into a broad range of aircraft and engines, particularly in the military. Bayha stressed that ATI has materials everywhere from the front to the back end of the engine. It has titanium in the front and nickel-based materials and steel in the hotter parts. The company also makes engine shafts out of some high-performance steel material. “So we can literally make almost anything that goes into an aerospace engine,” said Bayha.

For land-based defense applications, ATI has a Defense Market Sector team that has been working closely with the Navy and the Army. ATI works with BAE Systems to develop materials for armoring-up different military vehicles. Although steel is excellent at stopping kinetic impacts, it is also heavy. “Titanium is an enabler for getting more out of your vehicles, having them last longer and not degrade as fast,” Bayha said. “They have enough trouble with all the sand and other events that go on around the world and all of the bullets flying around that they don’t need to double their weight to carry. So that’s one of the reasons why we’re developing titanium for these types of applications.” Smart weaponry is another area where ATI supplies materials for making parts for missiles and other weapons such as mortar tubes.

Bayha said that the company’s work on powder materials is important for additive manufacturing. “Essentially you melt some material and you put it through a nozzle and you hit it with some argon gas and you rapidly solidify the material into a really, really fine particulate. I’m talking about things that are under about 100 microns in diameter,” he explained. They screen and clean material, and it is ultimately used for making billet or additive manufactured parts. He mentioned how a customer had sent ATI a specification for a material—the company met the specification, and yet because it did not fully understand how the material would behave in the customer’s specific equipment, the material did not work. He said that this is not unusual in the field of additive manufacturing. As a result, the company has a researcher at North Carolina State University helping to understand how the materials behave in additive manufacturing machines and how often materials need to be replenished. He is also looking at the spatter

emitted from a laser system, where it goes, and how it impacts the part, with an end goal of reducing defects.

Bayha explained that the company is also interested in titanium aluminide. It is a high-performance material, but there are many problems associated with implementing it in service. It is a powder-based material that is extremely brittle. He said that one of the driving requirements for the materials that ATI develops is the ability to operate at higher temperatures. Higher performance engines require materials that can withstand higher temperatures, especially with high corrosion and oxidation resistance.

There are various types of additive manufacturing including laser processes, electron beam processes, freeform, and laser sintering. They all use different versions of powder, and matching the manufacturing technique to the best material is difficult. Bayha showed a video of freeform additive manufacturing, which he said is great for extremely complex parts with complex and changing cross-sections. He explained that there are some issues that the industry has to address with surface finish and on the insides of the hollows of the parts. Bayha said that it is common for people to claim that complexity is free with additive manufacturing, but “that’s not true; complexity causes you other problems, as I mentioned about machining and cleaning up some of the inner surfaces.” Like any manufacturing process, there will be drawbacks and limitations to the technology that will have to be overcome.

The hearth melt processes are made to eliminate defects from raw materials. Typically, aerospace materials are double-melted. “That’s by specification,” Bayha said. “Those specifications were written before we had hearth melting technology.” He has spent about 10 years working to get a single melt version of these materials for aircraft use. ATI is also working on current conductive mold processes and flow forging, which involves using a material that is 5 or 6 inches in diameter and a couple of feet long, spinning it, working it down, and making it into a long tube. That process can produce a seamless tube that does not require welding, thereby eliminating defects.

A workshop participant asked about how some Chinese companies had, virtually overnight, dramatically improved their metal production facilities with new equipment and started producing higher quality products. The participant asked, “Would you look at them as pretty tough competition for the future, or would you look to license some of your alloys to them and try to work partnerships?” Bayha replied that some basic materials are at the point where everyone will be making them, so unless American companies improve their own ability to make them faster, better, and cheaper, they will soon be facing worldwide competition. He added that although the companies in China had improved their cleanliness, that was not the only issue of concern. “You’ve got to have that sense of quality and intolerance for defects,” he said. “Certainly, it’s a culture that we have at our company and service to our customers.” Bayha added, “We have to stay ahead of them where we can come up with the ideas and process modeling. All of our process models are internally

developed. They use some platforms that are commercially available like D form or forge, or some of these other things, but then we put in our own modules and that’s just another way we maintain our technological advantage.”

Another participant asked how ATI’s development of advanced material compares to its customers’ requests. The participant also wondered whether ATI is creating markets for the Chinese to easily enter and thus become the providers of the major products. Bayha said that he did not think ATI was creating markets; the demand is being driven by companies such as General Electric. He said that the customers are creating the demand and establishing some difficult specifications. His company places a premium on quality and strives to provide that above all; cost is not its primary driver. “In the aerospace industry, materials are blessed, if you will, through a committee of the entire industry, and then they make recommendations to the Federal Aviation Administration. So nothing flies unless the Federal Aviation Administration gives it their blessing, and to get there you have to have a huge statistically based data set that shows you’re going to have one failure in 10,000 tests that you run. So there’s a lot of care that goes into that,” Bayha noted. He said that when his company first stated its intention to go to single-melt processes, the big aerospace companies objected. ATI had to provide data to demonstrate that the processes would work. The Chinese may be able to compete in some areas, but they are not competitive in others, he added.

Another participant asked where ATI gets its titanium and in what forms it comes. “Titanium is beach sand,” Bayha explained. “People dig it up and Australia has given the world all the beach sand it can handle right now. We have a sponge plant, our own sponge plant out in Utah, and we use what’s called the Kroll process. It’s an electrochemical process to separate titanium oxide and titanium dioxide and make just plain titanium and then oxygen atoms.”

They also recycle extensively. “We offer every one of our customers a buyback program for their scrap,” he explained. “It does two things: It gets the scrap back to us and gives us low cost input materials, but it also guarantees the customer that a lot of the materials that we’re making, we’ve already melted a couple times and already have the quality in it. So it’s like you’re just re-melting it, remanufacturing some of that same material.”

He added that low-cost titanium initiatives have not really made much of an impact. “They all seem to have the problem of going from about a 50 lb unit to something that’s much more industrial-sized,” he noted. DARPA has a low-cost titanium program. He commented, “There’s a lot of really good ideas out there. But again, they’re making cupfuls, and we make 30 million lb of titanium every year, so we’ve got to have more than a cupful, and right now the best way to do that we know of is with utilizing sponge.”

FACILITATED DISCUSSION ON GLOBAL TECHNOLOGY AWARENESS AND COLLABORATION NEEDS, OPPORTUNITIES, AND LESSONS

The final session of the workshop was a wrap-up discussion for the participants to share their observations.

Kern said that he thought there were a lot of contradictory lessons from the discussions. “I can feel really good about some things and see tremendous opportunities that are out there,” he said. “And then I turn around and I say ‘well, we can’t do this, we can’t do that, we have this restriction and that restriction.’” He noted that there is a lot of cooperation internationally but not much U.S. participation. “We’re seeing a lot of new creative ideas: coaching, mentoring, helping people develop new things,” he continued. The problem is that when the research turns to defense, the researchers cannot do it. And the European Union will not even look at defense work. He added that he has been impressed with ATI’s work on metals. He said that most of the machines he is familiar with are produced in Germany. He wondered, “Are we going to be back to the point where we own that machinery and can produce it in this country, or are we back to the point where we’re still dependent upon somebody else to do the heavy manufacturing machinery—not the process but the actual devices that we used to produce the products?”

Kern asked DeLoach about the Lightweight Metals Institute’s restrictions on foreign participation in its charter. “Well, they are in there because, again, the spirit of the Institute, the overarching mission of the Institute, is to increase U.S. competitiveness,” DeLoach explained. “So we have to have rules that govern foreign participation to ensure that the fruits of the Institutes’ labor don’t just get shipped overseas and not result in additional capability and jobs and whatnot here in the United States.”

Another participant asked if the Department of Energy has legislation that prevents the agency from making any awards unless there is substantial manufacture in the United States. DeLoach replied that the Lightweight Metals Institute’s restrictions were unlike those imposed upon the Department of Energy. He added that the rules are not related to International Traffic in Arms Regulations.

Mike McGrath, McGrath Analytics, LLC, noted that there are different projects with different emphases. For example, LIFT ensures that U.S. companies have access to the innovations needed to be preferred global competitors. It is about preserving an industrial base. He suggested that there is the possibility for a model similar to IMS or some others where what gets shared is decided on a project-by-project basis. He asked what is unique about the structure of the institutes that makes it difficult to deal with this project-by-project.

DeLoach responded that this may be possible. He said that there is a desire to create a network, and that may result in interaction that will eventually take place between different institutes. He said that there is discomfort because of a projec-

tion down the line that this is going to be a problem that might be a disincentive to companies to join or remain with the network, especially after the federal funding is depleted.

Another participant noted that this issue is similar to one that his organization is facing because it does not know whether it should be actively working with Singapore. The participant said, “I think having some rules in place is important, but, on the other hand, in each of these different areas, the situation may be quite different. The flexible rules right now are very helpful, but, on the other hand, it does cause a lot of worrying about what partners you can bring to the table and not lose.”

McGrath noted that government procurement has a tendency to design for the worst case: “And so you hypothesize some case where the United States doesn’t want to share with foreign entities, and then you make that the blanket solution for everything. And that’s probably not the right way to think about this.”

DeLoach emphasized that the Navy is grappling with the issue: “You want some level of structure, you don’t want it to just be a completely ad-hoc, case-by-case, very limited structure associated with it because there’s a fear that somewhere along the line you’re going to get tripped and it may be months or years down the line before you realize you were tripped up and there’s nothing you can do about it. But, on the other hand, we realize there’s such a diversity of technologies and sub-technologies, businesses, the focus of the institute; what you would do for an immature technology or budding technology like digital design and manufacturing might be different than the approach that you take for something a bit more mature like metals technologies.”

Another participant observed that DeLoach is “stuck between a rock and a hard place because on one side, you’ve got this mission to reduce costs and to use R&D dollars as effectively as you can. And on the other side, you’ve got this notion that’s written in your directives that say ‘well, you can’t take advantage of networks outside of the United States or knowledge outside of the United States.’ And, of course, our experience has been that there’s a lot of work being done in all of these areas around the world, and I’ve got to tell you, in some of these areas the United States is not number one and could really take advantage.”

The participant observed that if a company is based in the United States but has R&D facilities or manufacturing facilities overseas, it is not supposed to use the IP that it developed. He added that right now there is no way for anyone who is on the outside to see where the IP and the R&D is flowing. He suggested that someone return to the decision makers and point out that there is no way for them to be effective with those restrictions in place. DeLoach responded that decision makers are already doing that: “We are getting together. We are talking. The three DoD institutes have had the most discussion.”

Another participant suggested that there was a model for doing that in the United Kingdom. Rolls-Royce gets a lot of funding from the government of

the United Kingdom, to do essentially the same kind of things that the NNMIs are doing, to try to improve manufacturing in the United Kingdom and improve U.K. competitiveness. The participant commented, “But what Rolls-Royce does is when there’s a compelling reason to involve their supply chain in the United States or their division in the United States, their subsidiary in the United States, their Technology Strategy Board, which represents the U.K. government interest, [it can hear arguments that it is necessary to involve outside entities].” Another example is the Metals Affordability Initiative, a consortium of U.S. industries of which Rolls-Royce is a member. It has done projects with people in Germany, the United Kingdom, and other places with that agreement in place. So there are existing models that can be used to create a pathway toward approval.

DeLoach clarified that each cooperative agreement does have a process. “You present your case within at least 60 days in advance to the project manager and agreements officer, and then those folks have 30 days to answer. But there are no criteria. You don’t know what that answer is going to be based on,” he explained. “For my agreement, because I’m ONR, I’m going to go to the ONR agreements officer and the ONR council. The Digital Manufacturing and Design Institute is going to go to the Army, America Makes is going to go to the Air Force, and so on and so forth. And all get different answers because it just says ‘do it’ but it doesn’t say ‘here are the criteria that those folks will consider.’”

“So that is something, and we‘ll use it, but we’re just afraid we’ll go down the line [and] somebody will get approved, [but] someone else in a similar situation will go through their channels and not get approved. It’ll get raised and then all of a sudden, someone else that thought they were doing everything correctly in the past is now put in a position where they have to justify why they made a decision. And we just don’t want to expose ourselves and people to that,” DeLoach continued.

A participant observed that many organizations overseas try to copy what the United States does in terms of international collaboration. He stated that he has been on advisory boards in Singapore and Japan for many years. He noted, “It is very good for us to actually have a well-thought-out process because we’re impacting many, many other organizations overseas.” He added that many of the agreements discuss IP “and as somebody who worked in a lot of a research programs that have international partnerships, we don’t have IP when we start. We’re just creating an environment where we can collaborate in an open way so that we can actually develop IP, and that’s where we have a lot of issues with the lawyers that we work with.” He also observed that universities tend to overreact to anything that they get from the government: “They are risk averse, and they take anything the government says and make it 100 times more complex.”

Another participant observed that in the current political environment, a government-funded effort to address the mission is doomed to failure because of

how it has to be structured. “I doubt that there could be common ground found on anything that could be perceived as giving money overseas or sending jobs overseas, and that’s the problem that you’re facing. And I suspect that’s why that language is in there so that those initiatives could get through and there could be funding; I don’t think that they would’ve gotten through had that language not been in there. So you’re stuck,” the participant said.

This participant suggested that because the government cannot do it, industry will have to develop plans to innovate: “They can work across borders and maybe the question to ask is ‘what can the government do to make it easier to follow that path and facilitate industry’s efforts to try and regain?’ What can you do to make it more attractive to bring these technologies over to the United States?”

Another participant observed that this is not simply a federal issue. She pointed to the Metals Institute’s inclusion of several states, yet state funding undoubtedly includes a stipulation that the money cannot be used out-of-state: “You’ve got this cost-sharing that’s sitting there that you can only use in Michigan or you can only use in Indiana. And they won’t change. You’re not going to have an influence on those states. They’re not going to change.” She added that sometimes the requirements are legislated, so changing them requires a change in the legislation, not simply a decision by an executive official.

DeLoach acknowledged that there are strings: “Everybody’s looking for value for their input, and, yes, the states are looking out for their constituents within their states.” However, the Metals Institute did manage to get the states to provide some leeway for regional benefits. He continued, “Now there are some states, like Ohio, that basically have said ‘we have a metric and it’s jobs created in Ohio.’” DeLoach said that the Navy is working with the states to gain some flexibility.

Another participant asked about what happens at the end of the cooperative agreement when the federal dollars dry out: Are there new provisions? Do the institutes have more flexibility because the federal government is no longer a player in the institute? DeLoach responded that once the federal government is out, the institutes have more flexibility. “That’s kind of a work in progress but in reality these nonprofits will be running these institutes, and when the federal dollars run out, it’s their show to run the way they want,” he said. “They are trying to set themselves up to be able to compete for federal dollars, but each institute has what they call a sustainability plan that kind of shows where their revenue streams are, how they trail off toward the end and what they’re going to use to compensate for that, and what new kinds of business they’ll target. But yes, bottom line is it becomes theirs to run as they will.”

Another participant suggested that there is a separation between where the money flows and just allowing others to collaborate. IMS operates that way. But DeLoach said that this cannot happen: “We have already done that, and they’ve said no to both.”

Cathy Foley, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, suggested that it might be useful to discriminate between the countries where there are very strong relationships “so that you’re actually in it together and be able to build on that so that you’re not just having a one-size-fits-all.” She added that it helps if the two sides are viewed as roughly equal in capabilities so that the possibility that one side is gaining more than the other does not seem as important. “It’s allowed me to go to our Australian government and say ‘we’ve got a coalition warfare thing here, we have to collaborate together.’ It’s not a one or the other. And that’s actually been, as a consequence, a much more fruitful collaboration. So I think you can reframe things so it’s not looking like it’s all bad.”

Another participant asked DeLoach whether the Navy is planning to have some furnaces in its facility. The participant also wondered whether the facility has the necessary thermal control to make cores and molds. DeLoach explained that the Navy is forming a network: “So we’ve got what we’re calling kind of an industrial commons, if you will. So we’ve got strategic partners that came together during the proposal phase to make sure we had coverage on some of the key metals manufacturing technologies, facilities, and capabilities that we need. [The Colorado School of Mines has] unique facilities that we’ll be able to use. Edison Welding Institute has unique facilities. We’ve got metal producers on our team. So these initial projects, because we have no equipment yet, we’ll be leaning on our membership for those capabilities.”

Eventually, the institute will own the equipment, and others could use it if they write a proposal. The institute’s charter is to go from manufacturing readiness level four to seven, involving some design activity. It will result in an actual component. DeLoach added that every project has an end component at the conclusion and a transition plan geared toward a specific component. The institute has to have a pilot-scale area within the facility and the ability to demonstrate how to produce something. He added that low-rate initial production would be part of a demonstration. This could be done within the institute; the company representatives would come in side-by-side, learn the processes, and then transition that technology to the company.

A participant added that in additive manufacturing, each machine is different. Although the controls may look the same, each one has its idiosyncrasies. “And so you have to get the vendor of the equipment at different points to come in and you have to show them what improvements have to be made with that equipment. Now these could be foreign companies, probably Germans in many cases. So by actually working with them because that’s what you need to get the process equipment operating the way you need it to, you’re helping them build their capability as well. So I assume that’s understood and there won’t be an issue there. Because if you don’t let these folks in, then it’s going to be very difficult to do advanced manufacturing,” the participant explained.

DeLoach acknowledged that equipment development and understanding the essential variables associated with a particular piece of equipment requires engaging the equipment manufacturers. “In those cases in which the equipment manufacturer is a foreign entity, we will struggle. We will have to just get over that. And those will be the cases, the times when we’ll have to make the case that it is in the best interest in terms of technology development and potential economic growth in lightweight metals to engage a foreign entity, and we’ll put ourselves on the mercy of the court and hope the court rules in our favor,” he explained.

Another participant asked what it means to be a member of an institute. DeLoach answered that member universities pay fees; Ohio State University and the University of Michigan are two of the biggest contributors. The participant observed that state university budgets have dropped substantially in recent years, down to less than 50 percent of what they used to be. “We’re called a state university, but we get less than 25 percent of our budget from the state. Everything comes from the research grants that faculty members bring in and we provide—they take the overhead. We don’t even get anything back,” the participant described. DeLoach responded, “We have a fee structure that allows membership by smaller, maybe not in terms of size, but in terms of available money, [universities]. . . . We do have different levels of membership, but it buys you different things.”

A participant noted that the Department of Energy’s laboratories have a weapons mission, but there are many foreign nationals present on the campuses doing unclassified research. There are controls in place to ensure that that information does not cross borders. He suggested that they might implement something like classification guides. Those are documents written very specifically to describe technical areas that allow a person to make decisions ahead of time. It gives the person space and time to coordinate those kinds of decisions to avoid getting stuck in a project timeline. The participant suggested that DeLoach might talk to some people at the National Nuclear Security Administration’s laboratories and consider what best practices to adopt. DeLoach agreed that that was a good idea.

McGrath determined that there is an elegant simplicity to the way IMS operates; there may be occasions when there are dual-use technologies and when DoDsponsored projects could operate in that arena. But he added that many things are defense-unique and are complicated to do on an international basis. He suggested setting up an IMS-type arrangement, perhaps with the Five Eyes countries, so as to have the terms of reference that provide the umbrella. “You have a very low overhead organization that does matchmaking and coaching to help projects come together, and you allow the member countries and their industries to say ‘here’s a project that I’m funded to do anyway. I want to bring it in to this arena because it makes sense to do it on a collaborative basis.’ And the two-page project proposal, the fast approvals, the practices of IMS seem to have worked pretty well for the past 20 years,” he observed.