NAMII's Work Draws Brown, 'Influx' of R&D Inquiries
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- Staff at the new National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute here are still catching up from the requests the downtown center received following President Obama's acknowledgement during his State of the Union Address a month go.
Obama's "acknowledgement of the incredible work" being done at NAMII has "caused us to have a lot of attention" from not just media outlets "but from those who want to so research and development with us," said Ed Morris, NAMII's director. "Responding to all these requests, we're trying to catch up with all the influx at this point."
U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, visiting NAMII Friday for the first time since its opening last fall, said he knew Obama was interested in the legislation he was working on with the White House to establish a national network of manufacturing innovation. He was surprised nonetheless at the specific mention of the Youngstown-based program.
"It was pretty exciting to be sitting in the House of Representatives when the president was speaking to a joint session of Congress and the president mentioned Youngstown, Ohio -- that we're a leader in the country of this, not just an example but a leader," the Democrat said. The president wants to establish 15 to 18 similar centers focused on manufacturing innovation.
“The White House really wants to do this,” Brown said. The problem is that many members of Congress “don’t see the importance of manufacturing” if they’re not from this part of the country, he remarked.
“It’s not just the Midwest, there’s manufacturing everywhere. We just lead on it in the Midwest and we’re trying to bring our colleagues around,” Brown continued. “We’re not asking for a lot of federal money but asking for some focus on manufacturing strategy.”
"NAMII of course is the pilot institute," its director, Morris, added. "We tend to think of it as the flagship institute for the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation -- leading the fleet, learning how to do this and learning how to do it well, to take that technology and to accelerate that technology for the benefit of the United States, for manufacturing and for jobs."
"Someone said that this is a bit like a teaching hospital," Brown said. "What happens with this research and what happens with this innovation is going to spawn entrepreneurial activity."
Morris and Brown were joined on the tour and the news conference that followed by Youngstown State University administrators, a YSU student from a new internship and co-op program, NAMII"s founding director, Ralph Resnick, and Barb Ewing, chief operating office of the Youngstown Business Incubator, where NAMII is housed.
During the visit, Brown saw examples of various additive manufacturing techniques and items produced by them. One included a component for the tail rotor blade of an AH-64 Apache helicopter. Prior to development of the replacement component using additive manufacturing, the entire rotor blade had to be replaced at a cost of $17,000 per blade.
Additive manufacturing has been around two to three decades but technical barriers remains to more widespread use, Morris said.
"When you talk about additive manufacturing it's more than just the process and the equipment you saw [during the tour]. It's the whole technique of doing the design," he explained. "You can do some radically different things with additive manufacturing you can do in no other way."
"It's a whole new way of thinking because it creates accessibility that you don't have with today's technology," said Martin Abraham, dean of YSU's College of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. "You will be able to do things iyou can't do today. We have to get the engineers to understand what the potential is and provide them the tools they need to design parts for an additive manufacturing process."
Like other universities, YSU instructs its students in theory, Abraham said. “We teach them now engineers are supposed to design products and how they’re supposed to do things,” he said. “But what sets us apart is we provide our students the direct knowledge of the application of the theory. … Our students are ready to work the day they graduate. They make immediately effective employees.”
Internships and co-ops have allowed Matt Azam of Youngstown, an industrial and systems engineering major at YSU, to get 18 months of experience in the workplace. “These experiences are absolutely critical because it shows you the different aspects of the real work world that you do not simply get in the classroom,” Azam said.
The second-level space where the news conference took place will serve as an educational space for "K through gray," Morris said. Instead of a “traditional teaching environment” it will be a more futuristic one that is “really critical in instituting a culture for innovation,” he added. He also said he envisions students from YSU doing projects there.
Although not concerned about funding for NAMII and the proposed national network in the near term, Brown does worry what the ongoing budget battles in Washington could mean in the year ahead. “This is too important to falter in moving forward,” he said. “It’s not all the future of manufacturing but this is a significant component of it.”
Earlier Story:
Brown Tours NAMII, Calls for National Network
Copyright 2013 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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