Clemson University is helping make manufacturing faster, cheaper and more environmentally friendly with technology it is developing with several other schools and companies.
The Clemson Composites Center is working on new technology for automotive and advanced-manufacturing applications that will use composites to 3D print manufacturing tools. The project got a boost with a $5.2 million grant from U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Manufacturing Office and industry partners.
Research will include Honda Development & Manufacturing of America, Ohio State University and Additive Engineering Solutions LLC, but will be centered at Greenville’s Clemson Composites Center.
The project involves using 3D-printed tools to stamp metal or other composite materials to manufacture parts, thus lowering the cost to produce these tools.
“The composite tool is a low-cost technology,” said Srikanth Pilla, the project’s principal investigator and founding director of the Clemson Composites Center and the Jenkins Endowed Professor of Automotive Engineering. “At the same time, you can recycle the tools we will be creating.”
The technology involves artificial intelligence that will help determine the ideal composite material architecture and optimal manufacturing process, an approach called inverse design, according to Clemson University.
“After we finish this project, our goal is to create artificial intelligence that will help determine how to build these tools, using computer models to make predictions,” said Feng Luo, the Marvin J. Pinson, Jr. ’46 Distinguished Professor in Clemson’s School of Computing.
