Making light work: CMM Inspection

The National Center for Manufacturing Sciences is helping industry develop lightweight automotive parts from nontraditional materials.

The fractious U.S. Congress has offered bipartisan support for the Obama Administration’s National Network for Manufacturing Innovation, the network of manufacturing hubs designed to bring together government, industry and university resources to improve materials and processes. Nine hubs have been started since the NNMI was first proposed in 2012, with 45 expected by the end of the decade.

However, such collaboration across institutions long predates NNMI. As the first NNMI hub, America Makes, enters its fourth year, another organization, the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences, is celebrating its 30th anniversary. NCMS was founded as North American manufacturers faced intensifying competition from overseas.

Assembly at BMW’s plant in Dingolfing, Germany. BMW has worked with NCMS to research the replacement of parts made of traditional metals with ones made of lightweight titanium alloys or carbon composites. Image courtesy BMW Group.

“Since 1986, NCMS has been a leader in building industry/government collaborations to bring cutting-edge innovations to market. We accomplish this faster, at lower cost and with fewer risks than if participants worked independently,” said Pam Hurt, NCMS director of membership and communications. “By leveraging our resources and network of 4,000-plus partners, we arrive at solutions that improve the competitive standing of the North American manufacturing base.”

Though NCMS’s founding mission was to provide the required infrastructure for collaborative R&D—which the center still does—the organization has evolved along with manufacturing and now provides products, services and initiatives to further the overall goal of improving global competitiveness.

Weighty Matters

Jon Riley, NCMS senior vice president of technology, spoke to CTE about another area in which the center has a long record of successful collaboration: lightweighting.

“Both the aerospace industry, because of the high cost of jet fuel, and the automotive industry, because of tightening C.A.F.E. (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards, have had a strong motivation to pursue methods of making their products lighter,” Riley said.

BMW of North America LLC, Woodcliff Lake, N.J., is an example of an OEM that has worked with NCMS on lightweighting.

Photo and diagram of a custom-built 20′ tall drop tower used to test the composite B-pillar at the University of Delaware Center for Composite Materials. Image courtesy UD-CMM.

NCMS administered the Department of Energy-sponsored Lightweighting Automotive Materials for Increased Fuel Efficiency Program, which brought BMW together with Clemson University–International Center for Automotive Research (CU-ICAR), American Titanium Works and machine tool builder Okuma America Corp. to demonstrate the
feasibility of manufacturing a titanium automotive part to reduce mass and improve fuel efficiency. The component was a front-suspension fork assembly on a BMW sport activity vehicle produced from a ductile-iron casting—a component that BMW would like to be able to replace with a titanium one.

“Although titanium has a much better strength-to-weight ratio than traditional metals and great corrosion resistance, material and processing costs have kept it from being widely used in automotive,” Riley said.