NSF Workshop On Advanced Manufacturing Research Needs For The Aerospace Industry

University Of Texas At Arlington, Arlington TX

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports a NSF workshop focused on identifying undergraduate research in advanced manufacturing that would support the aerospace industry. The workshop is held in Dallas, Texas due to the proximity of aerospace manufacturers, service providers, and manufacturing support companies. Aircraft manufacturing is considered one of the technological backbones of the U.S. manufacturing base. As an industry, aerospace manufacturing directly supports high-skilled and relatively well-paid private sector manufacturing jobs worldwide and with industry-wide estimated sales of over $200 billion generally accounts for approximately 1.4 to 1.7% of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP). U.S. commercial (non-defense, non-space) aerospace manufacturing industry has major trends affecting the future of the industry. Manufacturing of aerospace composites and materials has currently reached a plateau where performance is high but component costs have not been reduced. The origins of using advanced manufacturing such as additive manufacturing for composite development has provided an unprecedented opportunity to promote manufacturing resurgence. This is essential to the reduction of aerospace value chain production costs, increased aircraft throughput (time to market), and improved sustainability to the environment (reduce carbon footprint and minimize lifetime cycle costs). The workshop will last 2.5 days, and will include 15 leaders and up to 100 participants from industry, government and academe to characterize the current state of the art, and summarize future needs in four domains, including: advanced sensing and control; visualization, informatics and digital manufacturing; advanced materials manufacturing, and; environmental and sustainability. This workshop will work to achieve the following five objectives that collectively lead to the identification of specific research and education needs, as well as the initiation of a national roadmap towards addressing the needs: (1) Examine and review cutting edge research in manufacturing process technologies, automation methods and equipment, and systems-level research taking place in industry, (2) Assess future prospects and outlook, including the growth in the use and the demand for advanced machinery and processes, (3) Gather the aerospace industry's perspective of the short-term (1-3 year ahead) and long-term (3-10 years ahead) research issues, (4) Identify and formulate specific needs, gaps and challenges, in the aerospace value stream, (5) Formulate recommendations for research and education programs, including follow-up workshops as needed, to advance manufacturing technologies and systems for the aerospace industry.