Smart Manufacturing Leadership Coalition Wins DOE Funding
Professor Thomas Edgar is principal investigator of the Smart Manufacturing Leadership Coalition (SMLC) which recently won a contract to start developing the nation’s first open smart-manufacturing technology platform for collaborative industrial networked information applications. The innovative $10 million project will receive $7.8 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
“By combining high fidelity modeling and novel sensors, we can perform real-time control and optimization of process equipment to achieve significant reductions in energy consumption,” said Edgar, who is also interim director of the Energy Institute at UT Austin.
Dean Bartles, SMLC chairman, said smart manufacturing infrastructures and approaches will allow operators to make use of “big data” flows from fully instrumented plants to improve safety, environmental impact, and energy, water and materials use.
“Together, we intend to transform industrial productivity and energize a new era of innovation by empowering manufacturers with real-time, plant-wide workflow intelligence needed to deliver higher levels of game-changing competitiveness,” Bartles said.
The overall objectives of the initial SMLC project are to design and demonstrate this common platform that enables data modeling and simulation technologies to actively manage energy use in conjunction with plant production systems. The platform will show how real-time management of energy use as a key driver in business decisions can be applied across many small, medium and large U.S. manufacturing companies.
“For the past two decades, most U.S. manufacturers have managed energy efficiency in their factories and plants passively instead of actively as part of their production systems,” said R. Neal Elliott, director of research at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy and a coalition board member. His research estimates that the U.S. can reduce manufacturing energy intensity “by more than half in the next 20 years, as we begin to integrate smart technologies that actively manage energy use across entire manufacturing systems, plants and ultimately supply chains.”
The SMLC’s platform-development approach uses industrial test beds with actual manufacturing data and applications to ensure it is driven by industry needs. The first two test beds funded by the DOE Clean Energy Manufacturing contract will be at a General Dynamics Army munitions plant to optimize heat-treating furnaces and at a Praxair hydrogen processing plant to optimize steam-methane reforming furnaces. The test bed project technologies could demonstrate how to make U.S. manufacturers more competitive by reducing annual generation of CO2 emissions by 69 million tons, and waste heat by 1.3 quads, or approximately 1.3 percent of total U.S. energy use.
With direction from the full membership of the SMLC, the project is a collaborative effort among The University of Texas at Austin, Emerson Process Management, Honeywell Automation and Control Solutions, Invensys, Rockwell Automation, American Institute of Chemical Engineers, National Center for Manufacturing Sciences, University of California Los Angeles and Nimbis Services.
For more information, visit smartmanufacturingcoalition.org. Information for this release was provided by the Smart Manufacturing Coalition.
Tags: DOE funding, energy, energy efficiency, energy use, factories, industrial productivity, McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering, plant production systems, plants, reducing energy consumption, research, Smart Manufacturing Leadership Coalition, The University of Texas at Austin, Thomas Edgar, Tom Edgar