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<p>A recent award from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) brings together researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and Lehigh University (Lehigh) under the <a href=”https://www.darpa.mil/program/multiobjective-engineering-and-testing-of-alloy-structures”>Multiobjective Engineering and Testing of Alloy Structures (METALS) program</a>. The team will research novel design tools for the simultaneous optimization of shape and compositional gradients in multi-material structures that complement new high-throughput materials testing techniques, with particular attention paid to the bladed disk (blisk) geometry commonly found in turbomachinery (including jet and rocket engines) as an exemplary challenge problem.</p><p>“This project could have important implications across a wide range of aerospace technologies. Insights from this work may enable more reliable, reusable, rocket engines that will power the next generation of heavy-lift launch vehicles,” says Zachary Cordero, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor in the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) and the project’s lead principal investigator. “This project merges classical mechanics analyses with cutting-edge generative AI design technologies to unlock the plastic reserve of compositionally graded alloys allowing safe operation in previously inaccessible conditions.”</p><p>Different locations in blisks require different thermomechanical properties and performance, such as resistance to creep, low cycle fatigue, high strength, etc. Large scale production also necessitates consideration of cost and sustainability metrics such as sourcing and recycling of alloys in the design.</p><p>“Currently, with standard manufacturing and design procedures, one must come up with a single magical material, composition, and processing parameters to meet ‘one part-one material’ constraints,” says Cordero. “Desired properties are also often mutually exclusive prompting inefficient design tradeoffs and compromises.”</p><p>Although a one-material approach may be optimal for a singular location in a component, it may leave other locations exposed to failure or may require a critical material to be carried throughout an entire part when it may only be needed in a specific location. With the rapid advancement of additive manufacturing processes that are enabling voxel-based composition and property control, the team sees unique opportunities for leap-ahead performance in structural components are now possible.</p><p>Cordero’s collaborators include Zoltan Spakovszky, the T. Wilson (1953) Professor in Aeronautics in AeroAstro; A. John Hart, the Class of 1922 Professor and head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering; Faez Ahmed, ABS Career Development Assistant Professor of mechanical engineering at MIT; S. Mohadeseh Taheri-Mousavi, assistant professor of&nbsp;materials science and engineering at CMU; and Natasha Vermaak, associate professor of mechanical engineering and mechanics at Lehigh.</p><p>The team’s expertise spans hybrid integrated computational material engineering and machine-learning-based material and process design, precision instrumentation, metrology, topology optimization, deep generative modeling, additive manufacturing, materials characterization, thermostructural analysis, and turbomachinery.</p><p>“It is especially rewarding to work with the graduate students and postdoctoral researchers collaborating on the METALS project, spanning from developing new computational approaches to building test rigs operating under extreme conditions,” says Hart. “It is a truly unique opportunity to build breakthrough capabilities that could underlie propulsion systems of the future, leveraging digital design and manufacturing technologies.”</p><p><em>This research is funded by DARPA under contract HR00112420303. The views, opinions, and/or findings expressed are those of the author and should not be interpreted as representing the official views or policies of the Department of Defense or the U.S. government and no official endorsement should be inferred.</em></p>

<p>Industrial electrochemical processes that use electrodes to produce fuels and chemical products are hampered by the formation of bubbles that block parts of the electrode surface, reducing the area available for the active reaction. Such blockage reduces the performance of the electrodes by anywhere from 10 to 25 percent.</p><p>But new research reveals a decades-long misunderstanding about the extent of that interference. The findings show exactly how the blocking effect works and could lead to new ways of designing electrode surfaces to minimize inefficiencies in these widely used electrochemical processes.</p><p>It has long been assumed that the entire area of the electrode shadowed by each bubble would be effectively inactivated. But it turns out that a much smaller area — roughly the area where the bubble actually contacts the surface — is blocked from its electrochemical activity. The new insights could lead directly to new ways of patterning the surfaces to minimize the contact area and improve overall efficiency.</p><p>The findings are <a href=”https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2024/nr/d4nr02628d” target=”_blank”>reported today in the journal <em>Nanoscale</em></a>, in a paper by recent MIT graduate Jack Lake PhD ’23, graduate student Simon Rufer, professor of mechanical engineering Kripa Varanasi, research scientist Ben Blaiszik, and six others at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory. The team has made available an open-source, AI-based software tool that engineers and scientists can now use to automatically recognize and quantify bubbles formed on a given surface, as a first step toward controlling the electrode material’s properties.</p><p>Gas-evolving electrodes, often with catalytic surfaces that promote chemical reactions, are used in a wide variety of processes, including the production of “green” hydrogen without the use of fossil fuels, carbon-capture processes that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, aluminum production, and the chlor-alkali process that is used to make widely used chemical products.</p><p>These are very widespread processes. The chlor-alkali process alone accounts for 2 percent of all U.S. electricity usage; aluminum production accounts for 3 percent of global electricity; and both carbon capture and hydrogen production are likely to grow rapidly in coming years as the world strives to meet greenhouse-gas reduction targets. So, the new findings could make a real difference, Varanasi says.</p><p>“Our work demonstrates that engineering the contact and growth of bubbles on electrodes can have dramatic effects” on how bubbles form and how they leave the surface, he says. “The knowledge that the area under bubbles can be significantly active ushers in a new set of design rules for high-performance electrodes to avoid the deleterious effects of bubbles.”</p><p>“The broader literature built over the last couple of decades has suggested that not only that small area of contact but the entire area under the bubble is passivated,” Rufer says. The new study reveals “a significant difference between the two models because it changes how you would develop and design an electrode to minimize these losses.”</p><p>To test and demonstrate the implications of this effect, the team produced different versions of electrode surfaces with patterns of dots that nucleated and trapped bubbles at different sizes and spacings. They were able to show that surfaces with widely spaced dots promoted large bubble sizes but only tiny areas of surface contact, which helped to make clear the difference between the expected and actual effects of bubble coverage.</p><p>Developing the software to detect and quantify bubble formation was necessary for the team’s analysis, Rufer explains. “We wanted to collect a lot of data and look at a lot of different electrodes and different reactions and different bubbles, and they all look slightly different,” he says. Creating a program that could deal with different materials and different lighting and reliably identify and track the bubbles was a tricky process, and machine learning was key to making it work, he says.</p><p>Using that tool, he says, they were able to collect “really significant amounts of data about the bubbles on a surface, where they are, how big they are, how fast they’re growing, all these different things.” The <a href=”https://github.com/differentiate-catalysis/catalyst-bubble-detection/tree/main” target=”_blank”>tool is now freely available</a> for anyone to use via the GitHub repository.</p><p>By using that tool to correlate the visual measures of bubble formation and evolution with electrical measurements of the electrode’s performance, the researchers were able to disprove the accepted theory and to show that only the area of direct contact is affected. Videos further proved the point, revealing new bubbles actively evolving directly under parts of a larger bubble.</p><p>The researchers developed a very general methodology that can be applied to characterize and understand the impact of bubbles on any electrode or catalyst surface. They were able to quantify the bubble passivation effects in a new performance metric they call BECSA (Bubble-induced electrochemically active surface), as opposed to ECSA (electrochemically active surface area), that is used in the field. “The BECSA metric was a concept we defined in an earlier study but did not have an effective method to estimate until this work,” says Varanasi.</p><p>The knowledge that the area under bubbles can be significantly active ushers in a new set of design rules for high-performance electrodes. This means that electrode designers should seek to minimize bubble contact area rather than simply bubble coverage, which can be achieved by controlling the morphology and chemistry of the electrodes. Surfaces engineered to control bubbles can not only improve the overall efficiency of the processes and thus reduce energy use, they can also save on upfront materials costs. Many of these gas-evolving electrodes are coated with catalysts made of expensive metals like platinum or iridium, and the findings from this work can be used to engineer electrodes to reduce material wasted by reaction-blocking bubbles.</p><p>Varanasi says that “the insights from this work could inspire new electrode architectures that not only reduce the usage of precious materials, but also improve the overall electrolyzer performance,” both of which would provide large-scale environmental benefits.</p><p>The research team included Jim James, Nathan Pruyne, Aristana Scourtas, Marcus Schwarting, Aadit Ambalkar, Ian Foster, and Ben Blaiszik at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory. The work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under the ARPA-E program. This work made use of the MIT.nano facilities.</p>

<p>The pharmaceutical manufacturing industry has long struggled with the issue of monitoring the characteristics of a drying mixture, a critical step in producing medication and chemical compounds. At present, there are two noninvasive characterization approaches that are typically used: A sample is either imaged and individual particles are counted, or researchers use a scattered light to estimate the particle size distribution (PSD). The former is time-intensive and leads to increased waste, making the latter a more attractive option.</p><p>In recent years, MIT engineers and researchers developed a <a href=”https://news.mit.edu/2023/ai-based-estimator-manufacturing-medicine-0503″>physics and machine learning-based scattered light approach</a> that has been shown to improve manufacturing processes for pharmaceutical pills and powders, increasing efficiency and accuracy and resulting in fewer failed batches of products. A new open-access paper, “<a href=”https://www.nature.com/articles/s41377-024-01563-6″>Non-invasive estimation of the powder size distribution from a single speckle image</a>,” available in the journal <em>Light: Science &amp; Application</em>, expands on this work, introducing an even faster approach.&nbsp;</p><p>“Understanding the behavior of scattered light is one of the most important topics in optics,” says Qihang Zhang PhD ’23, an associate researcher at Tsinghua University. “By making progress in analyzing scattered light, we also invented a useful tool for the pharmaceutical industry. Locating the pain point and solving it by investigating the fundamental rule is the most exciting thing to the research team.”</p><p>The paper proposes a new PSD estimation method, based on pupil engineering, that reduces the number of frames needed for analysis. “Our learning-based model can estimate the powder size distribution from a single snapshot speckle image, consequently reducing the reconstruction time from 15 seconds to a mere 0.25 seconds,” the researchers explain.</p><p>“Our main contribution in this work is accelerating a particle size detection method by 60 times, with a collective optimization of both algorithm and hardware,” says Zhang. “This high-speed probe is capable to detect the size evolution in fast dynamical systems, providing a platform to study models of processes&nbsp;in pharmaceutical industry including drying, mixing and blending.”</p><p>The technique offers a low-cost, noninvasive particle size probe by collecting back-scattered light from powder surfaces. The compact and portable prototype is compatible with most of drying systems in the market, as long as there is an observation window. This online measurement approach may help control manufacturing processes, improving efficiency and product quality. Further, the previous lack of online monitoring prevented systematical study of dynamical models in manufacturing processes. This probe could bring a new platform to carry out series research and modeling for the particle size evolution.</p><p>This work, a successful collaboration between physicists and engineers, is generated from the MIT-Takeda program. Collaborators are affiliated with three MIT departments: Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. George Barbastathis, professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, is the article’s senior author.</p>

<p>Pick-and-place machines are a type of automated equipment used to place objects into structured, organized locations. These machines are used for a variety of applications — from electronics assembly to packaging, bin picking, and even inspection — but many current pick-and-place solutions are limited. Current solutions lack “precise generalization,” or the ability to solve many tasks without compromising on accuracy.</p><p>“In industry, you often see that [manufacturers] end up with very tailored solutions to the particular problem that they have, so a lot of engineering and not so much flexibility in terms of the solution,” Maria Bauza Villalonga PhD ’22, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind where she works on robotics and robotic manipulation. “SimPLE solves this problem and provides a solution to pick-and-place that is flexible and still provides the needed precision.”</p><p>A new <a href=”https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.adi8808″ target=”_blank”>paper</a> by MechE researchers published in the journal&nbsp;<em>Science Robotics</em>&nbsp;explores pick-and-place solutions with more precision. In precise pick-and-place, also known as kitting, the robot transforms an unstructured arrangement of objects into an organized arrangement.&nbsp;The approach, dubbed SimPLE (Simulation to Pick Localize and placE), learns to pick, regrasp and place objects using the object’s computer-aided design (CAD) model, and all without any prior experience or encounters with the specific objects.</p><p>“The promise of SimPLE is that we can solve many different tasks with the same hardware and software using simulation to learn models that adapt to each specific task,” says <a href=”https://meche.mit.edu/people/faculty/ALBERTOR@MIT.EDU”>Alberto Rodriguez</a>, an MIT visiting scientist who is a former member of the MechE faculty and now associate director of manipulation research for Boston Dynamics. SimPLE was developed by members of the Manipulation and Mechanisms Lab at MIT (MCube) under Rodriguez’ direction.&nbsp;</p><p>“In this work we show that it is possible to achieve the levels of positional accuracy that are required for many industrial pick and place tasks without any other specialization,” Rodriguez says.</p><p>Using&nbsp;a dual-arm robot equipped with visuotactile sensing, the SimPLE solution employs three main components: task-aware grasping, perception by sight and touch (visuotactile perception), and regrasp planning. Real observations are matched against a set of simulated observations through supervised learning so that a distribution of likely object poses can be estimated, and placement accomplished.</p><p>In experiments, SimPLE successfully demonstrated the ability to pick-and-place diverse objects spanning a wide range of shapes, achieving successful placements over 90 percent of the time for 6 objects, and over 80 percent of the time for 11 objects.</p><p>“There’s an intuitive understanding in the robotics community that vision and touch are both useful, but [until now] there haven’t been many systematic demonstrations of how it can be useful for complex robotics tasks,” says mechanical engineering doctoral student Antonia Delores Bronars SM ’22. Bronars, who is now working with Pulkit Agrawal, assistant&nbsp;professor&nbsp;in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), is continuing her PhD work investigating the incorporation of tactile capabilities into robotic systems.</p><p>“Most work on grasping ignores the downstream tasks,” says Matt Mason, chief scientist at&nbsp;Berkshire Grey&nbsp;and professor emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University who was not involved in the work. “This paper goes beyond the desire to mimic humans, and shows from a strictly functional viewpoint the utility of combining tactile sensing, vision, with two hands.”</p><p>Ken Goldberg, the William S. Floyd Jr. Distinguished Chair in Engineering&nbsp;at the University of California at Berkeley,&nbsp;who was also not involved in the study, says the robot manipulation&nbsp;methodology described in the paper offers a&nbsp;valuable alternative to the&nbsp;trend toward AI and machine learning methods.</p><p>“The authors combine well-founded geometric algorithms that can&nbsp;reliably achieve high-precision for a specific set of object shapes and&nbsp;demonstrate that this combination can significantly improve performance&nbsp;over AI methods,” says Goldberg, who is also co-founder and chief scientist for Ambi Robotics and Jacobi Robotics. “This can be immediately useful in industry and is an&nbsp;excellent example of what I call ‘good old fashioned engineering’ (GOFE).”</p><p>Bauza and Bronars say this work was informed by several generations of collaboration.</p><p>“In order to really demonstrate how vision and touch can be useful together, it’s necessary to build a full robotic system, which is something that’s very difficult to do as one person over a short horizon of time,” says Bronars. “Collaboration, with each other and with Nikhil [Chavan-Dafle PhD ‘20] and Yifan [Hou PhD ’21 CMU], and across many generations and labs really allowed us to build an end-to-end system.”</p>

<p>Metals get softer when they are heated, which is how blacksmiths can form iron into complex shapes by heating it red hot. And anyone who compares a copper wire with a steel coat hanger will quickly discern that copper is much more pliable than steel.</p><p>But scientists at MIT have discovered that when metal is struck by an object moving at a super high velocity, the opposite happens: The hotter the metal, the stronger it is. Under those conditions, which put extreme stress on the metal, copper can actually be just as strong as steel. The new discovery could lead to new approaches to designing materials for extreme environments, such as shields that protect spacecraft or hypersonic aircraft, or equipment for high-speed manufacturing processes.</p><p>The findings are described in a <a href=”https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07420-1″ target=”_blank”>paper appearing today</a> in the journal <em>Nature</em>, by Ian Dowding, an MIT graduate student, and Christopher Schuh, former head of MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, now dean of engineering at Northwestern University and visiting professor at MIT.</p><p>The new finding, the authors write, “is counterintuitive and at odds with decades of studies in less extreme conditions.” The unexpected results could affect a variety of applications because the extreme velocities involved in these impacts occur routinely in meteorite impacts on spacecraft in orbit and in high-speed machining operations used in manufacturing, sandblasting, and some additive manufacturing (3D printing) processes.</p><p>The experiments the researchers used to find this effect involved shooting tiny particles of sapphire, just millionths of a meter across, at flat sheets of metal. Propelled by laser beams, the particles reached high velocities, on the order of a few hundred meters per second. While other researchers have occasionally done experiments at similarly high velocities, they have tended to use larger impactors, at the scale of centimeters or larger. Because these larger impacts were dominated by effects of the shock of the impact, there was no way to separate out the mechanical and thermal effects.</p><p>The tiny particles in the new study don’t create a significant pressure wave when they hit the target. But it has taken a decade of research at MIT to develop methods of propelling such microscopic particles at such high velocities. “We’ve taken advantage of that,” Schuh says, along with other new techniques for observing the high-speed impact itself.</p><p>The team used extremely high-speed cameras “to watch the particles as they come in and as they fly away,” he says. As the particles bounce off the surface, the difference between the incoming and outgoing velocities “tells you how much energy was deposited” into the target, which is an indicator of the surface strength.</p><img src=”/sites/default/files/images/inline/mitnewsfalsecolor-lrg_0.gif” data-align=”center” data-entity-uuid=”36590aea-2b68-40e5-aa2c-df19a418063c” data-entity-type=”file” alt=”Three photos show a particle bouncing off of a surface. The particle bounces higher when the temperature is increased. These three images are labeled “20 °C, 100 °C, and 177 °C.”” width=”586″ height=”440″ data-caption=”Three photos show a particle bouncing off of a surface. The particle bounces higher when the temperature is increased. These three images are labeled “20 °C, 100 °C, and 177 °C.””><img src=”/sites/default/files/images/inline/MIT-StrongerWhenHeated-02-embed_0.jpg” data-entity-uuid=”b9d7b89d-a175-40dc-a833-84315f4e1698″ data-entity-type=”file” alt=” A series of 16 monochrome photos show a tiny particle bouncing on a surface.” width=”2000″ height=”379″ data-caption=”The team used extremely high-speed cameras to track particles. This sequence, from research data, shows a particle flying in and rebounding off of a surface.”><p>The tiny particles they used were made of alumina, or sapphire, and are “very hard,” Dowding says. At 10 to 20 microns (millionths of a meter) across, these are between one-tenth and one-fifth of the thickness of a human hair. When the launchpad behind those particles is hit by a laser beam, part of the material vaporizes, creating a jet of vapor that propels the particle in the opposite direction.</p><p>The researchers shot the particles at samples of copper, titanium, and gold, and they expect their results should apply to other metals as well. They say their data provide the first direct experimental evidence for this anomalous thermal effect of increased strength with greater heat, although hints of such an effect had been reported before.</p><p>The surprising effect appears to result from the way the orderly arrays of atoms that make up the crystalline structure of metals move under different conditions, according to the researchers’ analysis. They show that there are three separate effects governing how metal deforms under stress, and while two of these follow the predicted trajectory of increasing deformation at higher temperatures, it is the third effect, called drag strengthening, that reverses its effect when the deformation rate crosses a certain threshold.</p><p>Beyond this crossover point, the higher temperature increases the activity of phonons — waves of sound or heat — within the material, and these phonons interact with dislocations in the crystalline lattice in a way that limits their ability to slip and deform. The effect increases with increased impact speed and temperature, Dowding says, so that “the faster you go, the less the dislocations are able to respond.”</p><p>Of course, at some point the increased temperature will begin to melt the metal, and at that point the effect will reverse again and lead to softening. “There will be a limit” to this strengthening effect, Dowding says, “but we don’t know what it is.”</p><p>The findings could lead to different choices of materials when designing devices that may encounter such extreme stresses, Schuh says. For example, metals that may ordinarily be much weaker, but that are less expensive or easier to process, might be useful in situations where nobody would have thought to use them before.</p><p>The extreme conditions the researchers studied are not confined to spacecraft or extreme manufacturing methods. “If you are flying a helicopter in a sandstorm, a lot of these sand particles will reach high velocities as they hit the blades,” Dowding says, and under desert conditions they may reach the high temperatures where these hardening effects kick in.</p><p>The techniques the researchers used to uncover this phenomenon could be applied to a variety of other materials and situations, including other metals and alloys. Designing materials to be used in extreme conditions by simply extrapolating from known properties at less extreme conditions could lead to seriously mistaken expectations about how materials will behave under extreme stresses, they say.</p><p>The research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy.</p>

<p>Steel is one of the most useful materials on the planet. A backbone of modern life, it’s used in skyscrapers, cars, airplanes, bridges, and more. Unfortunately, steelmaking is an extremely dirty process.</p><p>The most common way it’s produced involves mining iron ore, reducing it in a blast furnace through the addition of coal, and then using an oxygen furnace to burn off excess carbon and other impurities. That’s why steel production <a href=”https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214629622000706#:~:text=Thus%2C%20it%20is%20perhaps%20inevitable,asset%20life%2C%20and%20trade%20challenges.” target=”_blank”>accounts for around 7 to 9 percent</a> of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, making it one of the dirtiest industries on the planet.</p><p>Now Boston Metal is seeking to clean up the steelmaking industry using an electrochemical process called molten oxide electrolysis (MOE), which eliminates many steps in steelmaking and releases oxygen as its sole byproduct.</p><p>The company, which was founded by MIT Professor Emeritus Donald Sadoway, Professor Antoine Allanore, and James Yurko PhD ’01, is already using MOE to recover high-value metals from mining waste at its Brazilian subsidiary, Boston Metal do Brasil. That work is helping Boston Metal’s team deploy its technology at commercial scale and establish key partnerships with mining operators. It has also built a prototype MOE reactor to produce green steel at its headquarters in Woburn, Massachusetts.</p><p>And despite its name, Boston Metal has global ambitions. The company has raised more than $370 million to date from organizations across Europe, Asia, the Americas, and the Middle East, and its leaders expect to scale up rapidly to transform steel production in every corner of the world.</p><p>“There’s a worldwide recognition that we need to act rapidly, and that’s going to happen through technology solutions like this that can help us move away from incumbent technologies,” Boston Metal Chief Scientist and former MIT postdoc Guillaume Lambotte says. “More and more, climate change is a part of our lives, so the pressure is on everyone to act fast.”</p><p><strong>A decades-long search</strong></p><p>Since the 1980s, Sadoway had conducted research on the electrochemical process by which aluminum is produced. The focus of the research was to find a replacement for the consumable anode used in that process, which makes carbon dioxide as a by-product. During that work, he began to conceptualize a similar electrochemical process to make iron, the precursor to steel.</p><p>But it wasn’t until around 2012 that Sadoway and Allanore, then a postdoc at MIT, discovered an iron-chromium alloy that could serve as a cheap enough anode material to make the process commercially viable and produce oxygen as a byproduct. That’s when the pair partnered with James Yurko, a former student, to found Boston Metal.</p><p>“All of the fundamental studies and the initial technologies came out of MIT,” Lambotte says.&nbsp;“We spun out of research that was patented at MIT and licensed from MIT’s Technology Licensing Office.”</p><p>Lambotte joined the company shortly after Sadoway’s team published a 2013 paper in <a href=”https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12134″ target=”_blank”><em>Nature</em></a> describing the MOE platform.</p><p>“That’s when it went from the lab, with a coffee cup-sized experiment to prove the fundamentals and produce a few grams, to a company that can produce hundreds of kilograms, and soon, tons of metal,” Lambotte says.</p><img src=”/sites/default/files/images/inline/MIT-BostonMetal-03-embed.jpg” data-align=”center” data-entity-uuid=”7fbd9d2b-cb48-4025-acbc-763c646cff87″ data-entity-type=”file” alt=”A schematic shows the process of making greener metal inside a large case. On top left, a pipe lets “Iron Ore” inside; “electrolytes” are represented as blue liquid with orange “molten iron” underneath. On bottom right of the case, a tap release the “liquid iron.” On top right, “Oxygen bubbles” are release from another pipe.” width=”1756″ height=”1434″ data-caption=”Boston Metal’s process takes place in modular MOE cells, each the size of a school bus. Here is a schematic of the process.”><p><br>Boston Metal’s molten oxide electrolysis process takes place in modular MOE cells, each the size of a school bus. Iron ore rock is fed into the cell, which contains the cathode (the negative terminal of the MOE cell) and an anode immersed in a liquid electrolyte. The anode is inert, meaning it doesn’t dissolve in the electrolyte or take part in the reaction other than serving as the positive terminal. When electricity runs between the anode and cathode and the cell reaches around 1,600 degrees Celsius, the iron oxide bonds in the ore are split, producing pure liquid metal at the bottom that can be tapped. The byproduct of the reaction is oxygen, and the process doesn’t require water, hazardous chemicals, or precious-metal catalysts.</p><p>The production of each cell depends on the size of its current. Lambotte says with about 600,000 amps, each cell could produce up to 10 tons of metal every day. Steelmakers would license Boston Metal’s technology and deploy as many cells as needed to reach their production targets.</p><p>Boston Metal is already using MOE to help mining companies recover high-value metals from their mining waste, which usually needs to undergo costly treatment or storage. Lambotte says it could also be used to produce many other kinds of&nbsp;metals down the line, and Boston Metal was recently selected to negotiate <a href=”https://www.energy.gov/articles/biden-harris-administration-announces-actions-strengthen-clean-energy-supply-chains-and” target=”_blank”>grant</a> funding to produce chromium metal — critical for a number of clean energy applications — in West Virginia.</p><p>“If you look around the world, a lot of the feedstocks for metal are oxides, and if it’s an oxide, then there’s a chance we can work with that feedstock,” Lambotte says. “There’s a lot of excitement because everyone needs a solution capable of decarbonizing the metal industry, so a lot of people are interested to understand where MOE fits in their own processes.”</p><p><strong>Gigatons of potential</strong></p><p>Boston Metal’s steel decarbonization technology is currently slated to reach commercial-scale in 2026, though its Brazil plant is already introducing the industry to MOE.</p><p>“I think it’s a window for the metal industry to get acquainted with MOE and see how it works,” Lambotte says. “You need people in the industry to grasp this technology. It’s where you form connections and how new technology spreads.”</p><p>The Brazilian plant runs on 100 percent renewable energy.</p><p>“We can be the beneficiary of this tremendous worldwide push to decarbonize the energy sector,” Lambotte says. “I think our approach goes hand in hand with that. Fully green steel requires green electricity, and I think what you’ll see is deployment of this technology where [clean electricity] is already readily available.”</p><p>Boston Metal’s team is excited about MOE’s application across the metals industry but is focused first and foremost on eliminating the gigatons of emissions from steel production.</p><p>“Steel produces around 10 percent of global emissions, so that is our north star,” Lambotte says. “Everyone is pledging carbon reductions, emissions reductions, and making net zero goals, so the steel industry is really looking hard for viable technology solutions. People are ready for new approaches.”</p>

<p>Consider the dizzying ascent of solar energy in the United States: In the past decade, solar capacity increased nearly 900 percent, with electricity production eight times greater in 2023 than in 2014. The jump from 2022 to 2023 alone was 51 percent, with a record 32 gigawatts (GW) of solar installations coming online. In the past four years, more solar has been added to the grid than any other form of generation. Installed solar now tops 179 GW, enough to power nearly 33 million homes. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is so bullish on the sun that its decarbonization plans envision solar satisfying 45 percent of the nation’s electricity demands by 2050.</p><p>But the continued rapid expansion of solar requires advances in technology, notably to improve the efficiency and durability of solar photovoltaic (PV) materials and manufacturing. That’s where Optigon, a three-year-old MIT spinout company, comes in.</p><p>“Our goal is to build tools for research and industry that can accelerate the energy transition,” says Dane deQuilettes, the company’s co-founder and chief science officer. “The technology we have developed for solar will enable measurements and analysis of materials as they are being made both in lab and on the manufacturing line, dramatically speeding up the optimization of PV.”</p><p>With roots in MIT’s vibrant solar research community, Optigon is poised for a 2024 rollout of technology it believes will drastically pick up the pace of solar power and other clean energy projects.</p><p><strong>Beyond silicon</strong></p><p>Silicon, the material mainstay of most PV, is limited by the laws of physics in the efficiencies it can achieve converting photons from the sun into electrical energy. Silicon-based solar cells can theoretically reach power conversion levels of just 30 percent, and real-world efficiency levels hover in the low 20s. But beyond the physical limitations of silicon, there is another issue at play for many researchers and the solar industry in the United States and elsewhere: China dominates the silicon PV market, from supply chains to manufacturing.</p><p>Scientists are eagerly pursuing alternative materials, either for enhancing silicon’s solar conversion capacity or for replacing silicon altogether.</p><p>In the past decade, a family of crystal-structured semiconductors known as perovskites has risen to the fore as a next-generation PV material candidate. Perovskite devices lend themselves to a novel manufacturing process using printing technology that could circumvent the supply chain juggernaut China has built for silicon. Perovskite solar cells can be stacked on each other or layered atop silicon PV, to achieve higher conversion efficiencies. Because perovskite technology is flexible and lightweight, modules can be used on roofs and other structures that cannot support heavier silicon PV, lowering costs and enabling a wider range of building-integrated solar devices.</p><p>But these new materials require testing, both during R&amp;D and then on assembly lines, where missing or defective optical, electrical, or dimensional properties in the nano-sized crystal structures can negatively impact the end product.</p><p>“The actual measurement and data analysis processes have been really, really slow, because you have to use a bunch of separate tools that are all very manual,” says Optigon co-founder and chief executive officer Anthony Troupe ’21. “We wanted to come up with tools for automating detection of a material’s properties, for determining whether it could make a good or bad solar cell, and then for optimizing it.”</p><p>“Our approach packed several non-contact, optical measurements using different types of light sources and detectors into a single system, which together provide a holistic, cross-sectional view of the material,” says Brandon Motes ’21, ME ’22, co-founder and chief technical officer.</p><p>“This breakthrough in achieving millisecond timescales for data collection and analysis means we can take research-quality tools and actually put them on a full production system, getting extremely detailed information about products being built at massive, gigawatt scale in real-time,” says Troupe.</p><p>This streamlined system takes measurements “in the snap of the fingers, unlike the traditional tools,” says Joseph Berry, director of the US Manufacturing of Advanced Perovskites Consortium and a senior research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “Optigon’s techniques are high precision and allow high throughput, which means they can be used in a lot of contexts where you want rapid feedback and the ability to develop materials very, very quickly.”</p><p>According to Berry, Optigon’s technology may give the solar industry not just better materials, but the ability to pump out high-quality PV products at a brisker clip than is currently possible. “If Optigon is successful in deploying their technology, then we can more rapidly develop the materials that we need, manufacturing with the requisite precision again and again,” he says. “This could lead to the next generation of PV modules at a much, much lower cost.”</p><p><strong>Measuring makes the difference</strong></p><p>With Small Business Innovation Research funding from DOE to commercialize its products and a grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, Optigon has settled into a space at the climate technology incubator Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts. Here, the team is preparing for this spring’s launch of its first commercial product, whose genesis lies in MIT’s GridEdge Solar Research Program.</p><p>Led by Vladimir Bulović, a professor of electrical engineering and the director of MIT.nano, the GridEdge program was established with funding from the Tata Trusts&nbsp;to develop lightweight, flexible, and inexpensive solar cells for distribution to rural communities around the globe. When deQuilettes joined the group in 2017 as a postdoc, he was tasked with directing the program and building the infrastructure to study and make perovskite solar modules.</p><p>“We were trying to understand once we made the material whether or not it was good,” he recalls. “There were no good commercial metrology [the science of measurements] tools for materials beyond silicon, so we started to build our own.” Recognizing the group’s need for greater expertise on the problem, especially in the areas of electrical, software, and mechanical engineering, deQuilettes put a call out for undergraduate researchers to help build metrology tools for new solar materials.</p><p>“Forty people inquired, but when I met Brandon and Anthony, something clicked; it was clear we had a complementary skill set,” says deQuilettes. “We started working together, with Anthony coming up with beautiful designs to integrate multiple measurements, and Brandon creating boards to control all of the hardware, including different types of lasers. We started filing multiple patents and that was when we saw it all coming together.”</p><p>“We knew from the start that metrology could vastly improve not just materials, but production yields,” says Troupe. Adds deQuilettes, “Our goal was getting to the highest performance orders of magnitude faster than it would ordinarily take, so we developed tools that would not just be useful for research labs but for manufacturing lines to give live feedback on quality.”</p><p>The device Optigon designed for industry is the size of a football, “with sensor packages crammed into a tiny form factor, taking measurements as material flows directly underneath,” says Motes. “We have also thought carefully about ways to make interaction with this tool as seamless and, dare I say, as enjoyable as possible, streaming data to both a dashboard an operator can watch and to a custom database.”</p><p><strong>Photovoltaics is just the start</strong></p><p>The company may have already found its market niche. “A research group paid us to use our in-house prototype because they have such a burning need to get these sorts of measurements,” says Troupe, and according to Motes, “Potential customers ask us if they can buy the system now.” deQuilettes says, “Our hope is that we become the de facto company for doing any sort of characterization metrology in the United States and beyond.”</p><p>Challenges lie ahead for Optigon: product launches, full-scale manufacturing, technical assistance, and sales. Greentown Labs offers support, as does MIT’s own rich community of solar researchers and entrepreneurs. But the founders are already thinking about next phases.</p><p>“We are not limiting ourselves to the photovoltaics area,” says deQuilettes. “We’re planning on working in other clean energy materials such as batteries and fuel cells.”</p><p>That’s because the team wants to make the maximum impact on the climate challenge. “We’ve thought a lot about the potential our tools will have on reducing carbon emissions, and we’ve done a really in-depth analysis looking at how our system can increase production yields of solar panels and other energy technologies, reducing materials and energy wasted in conventional optimization,” deQuilettes says. “If we look across all these sectors, we can expect to offset about 1,000 million metric tons of CO₂[carbondioxide] per year in the not-too-distant future.”</p><p>The team has written scale into its business plan. “We want to be the key enabler for bringing these new energy technologies to market,” says Motes. “We envision being deployed on every manufacturing line making these types of materials. It’s our goal to walk around and know that if we see a solar panel deployed, there’s a pretty high likelihood that it will be one we measured at some point.”</p>

<p>The recent ransomware attack on Change Healthcare, which severed the network connecting health care providers, pharmacies, and hospitals with health insurance companies, demonstrates just how disruptive supply chain attacks can be. In this case, it hindered the ability of those providing medical services to submit insurance claims and receive payments.<br><br>This sort of attack and other forms of data theft are becoming increasingly common and often target large, multinational corporations through the small and mid-sized vendors in their corporate supply chains, enabling breaks in these enormous systems of interwoven companies.<br><br>Cybersecurity researchers at MIT and the <a href=”https://hpi.de/en/research/research-school/international-branches/hasso-plattner-institute.html”>Hasso Plattner Institute</a> (HPI) in Potsdam, Germany, are focused on the different organizational security cultures that exist within large corporations and their vendors because it’s that difference that creates vulnerabilities, often due to the lack of emphasis on cybersecurity by the senior leadership in these small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).<br><br>Keri Pearlson, executive director of Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan (CAMS); Jillian Kwong, a research scientist at CAMS; and Christian Doerr, a professor of cybersecurity and enterprise security at HPI, are co-principal investigators (PIs) on the research project, “Culture and the Supply Chain: Transmitting Shared Values, Attitudes and Beliefs across Cybersecurity Supply Chains.”</p><p>Their project was selected in the 2023 inaugural round of grants from the <a href=”https://design.mit.edu/about/research”>HPI-MIT Designing for Sustainability program</a>, a multiyear partnership funded by HPI and administered by the MIT Morningside Academy for Design (MAD). The program awards about 10 grants annually of up to $200,000 each to multidisciplinary teams with divergent backgrounds in computer science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, engineering, design, architecture, the natural sciences, humanities, and business and management. The <a href=”https://design.mit.edu/about/research”>2024 Call for Applications</a> is open through June 3.<br><br>Designing for Sustainability grants support scientific research that promotes the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on topics involving sustainable design, innovation, and digital technologies, with teams made up of PIs from both institutions. The PIs on these projects, who have common interests but different strengths, create more powerful teams by working together.</p><p><strong>Transmitting shared values, attitudes, and beliefs to improve cybersecurity across supply chains</strong></p><p>The MIT and HPI cybersecurity researchers say that most ransomware attacks aren’t reported. Smaller companies hit with ransomware attacks just shut down, because they can’t afford the payment to retrieve their data. This makes it difficult to know just how many attacks and data breaches occur. “As more data and processes move online and into the cloud, it becomes even more important to focus on securing supply chains,” Kwong says. “Investing in cybersecurity allows information to be exchanged freely while keeping data safe. Without it, any progress towards sustainability is stalled.”</p><p>One of the first large data breaches in the United States to be widely publicized provides a clear example of how an SME cybersecurity can leave a multinational corporation vulnerable to attack. In 2013, hackers entered the Target Corporation’s own network by obtaining the credentials of a small vendor in its supply chain: a Pennsylvania HVAC company. Through that breach, thieves were able to install malware that stole the financial and personal information of 110 million Target customers, which they sold to card shops on the black market.</p><p>To prevent such attacks, SME vendors in a large corporation’s supply chain are required to agree to follow certain security measures, but the SMEs usually don’t have the expertise or training to make good on these cybersecurity promises, leaving their own systems, and therefore any connected to them, vulnerable to attack.</p><p>“Right now, organizations are connected economically, but not aligned in terms of organizational culture, values, beliefs, and practices around cybersecurity,” explains Kwong. “Basically, the big companies are realizing the smaller ones are not able to implement all the cybersecurity requirements. We have seen some larger companies address this by reducing requirements or making the process shorter. However, this doesn’t mean companies are more secure; it just lowers the bar for the smaller suppliers to clear it.”</p><p>Pearlson emphasizes the importance of board members and senior management taking responsibility for cybersecurity in order to change the culture at SMEs, rather than pushing that down to a single department, IT office, or in some cases, one IT employee.</p><p>The research team is using case studies based on interviews, field studies, focus groups, and direct observation of people in their natural work environments to learn how companies engage with vendors, and the specific ways cybersecurity is implemented, or not, in everyday operations. The goal is to create a shared culture around cybersecurity that can be adopted correctly by all vendors in a supply chain.</p><p>This approach is in line with the goals of the Charter of Trust Initiative, a partnership of large, multinational corporations formed to establish a better means of implementing cybersecurity in the supply chain network. The HPI-MIT team&nbsp;worked with companies from the Charter of Trust and others last year to understand the impacts of cybersecurity regulation on SME participation in supply chains&nbsp;and develop a conceptual framework to implement changes for stabilizing supply chains.</p><p>Cybersecurity is a prerequisite needed to achieve any of the United Nations’ SDGs, explains Kwong. Without secure supply chains, access to key resources and institutions can be abruptly cut off. This could include food, clean water and sanitation, renewable energy, financial systems, health care, education, and resilient infrastructure. Securing supply chains helps enable progress on all SDGs, and the HPI-MIT project specifically supports SMEs, which are a pillar of the U.S. and European economies.</p><p><strong>Personalizing product designs while minimizing material waste</strong></p><p>In a vastly different Designing for Sustainability joint research project that employs AI with engineering, “Personalizing Product Designs While Minimizing Material Waste” will use AI design software to lay out multiple parts of a pattern on a sheet of plywood, acrylic, or other material, so that they can be laser cut to create new products in real time without wasting material.</p><p>Stefanie Mueller, the TIBCO Career Development Associate Professor in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Patrick Baudisch, a professor of computer science and chair of the Human Computer Interaction Lab at HPI, are co-PIs on the project. The two have worked together for years; Baudisch was Mueller’s PhD research advisor at HPI.</p><p>Baudisch’s lab developed an online design teaching system called <a href=”https://kyub.com/”>Kyub</a> that lets students design 3D objects in pieces that are laser cut from sheets of wood and assembled to become chairs, speaker boxes, radio-controlled aircraft, or even functional musical instruments. For instance, each leg of a chair would consist of four identical vertical pieces attached at the edges to create a hollow-centered column, four of which will provide stability to the chair, even though the material is very lightweight.</p><p>“By designing and constructing such furniture, students learn not only design, but also structural engineering,” Baudisch says. “Similarly, by designing and constructing musical instruments, they learn about structural engineering, as well as resonance, types of musical tuning, etc.”</p><p>Mueller was at HPI when Baudisch developed the Kyub software, allowing her to observe “how they were developing and making all the design decisions,” she says. “They built a really neat piece for people to quickly design these types of 3D objects.” However, using Kyub for material-efficient design is not fast; in order to fabricate a model, the software has to break the 3D models down into 2D parts and lay these out on sheets of material. This takes time, and makes it difficult to see the impact of design decisions on material use in real-time.</p><p>Mueller’s lab at MIT developed software based on a layout algorithm that uses AI to lay out pieces on sheets of material in real time. This allows AI to explore multiple potential layouts while the user is still editing, and thus provide ongoing feedback. “As the user develops their design, <a href=”https://hcie.csail.mit.edu/research/fabricaide/fabricaide.html”>Fabricaide</a>&nbsp;decides good placements of parts onto the user’s available materials, provides warnings if the user does not have enough material for a design, and makes suggestions for how the user can resolve insufficient material cases,” according to the project website.</p><p>The joint MIT-HPI project integrates Mueller’s AI software with Baudisch’s Kyub software and adds machine learning to train the AI to offer better design suggestions that save material while adhering to the user’s design intent.</p><p>“The project is all about minimizing the waste on these materials sheets,” Mueller says. She already envisions the next step in this AI design process: determining how to integrate the laws of physics into the AI’s knowledge base to ensure the structural integrity and stability of objects it designs.</p><p><strong>AI-powered startup design for the Anthropocene: Providing guidance for novel enterprises</strong></p><p>Through her work with the teams of <a href=”https://designx.mit.edu/”>MITdesignX</a> and its international programs, Svafa Grönfeldt, faculty director of MITdesignX and professor of the practice in MIT MAD, has helped scores of people in startup companies use the tools and methods of design to ensure that the solution a startup proposes actually fits the problem it seeks to solve. This is often called the problem-solution fit.</p><p>Grönfeldt and MIT postdoc Norhan Bayomi are now extending this work to incorporate AI into the process, in collaboration with MIT Professor John Fernández and graduate student Tyler Kim. The HPI team includes Professor Gerard de Melo; HPI School of Entrepreneurship Director Frank Pawlitschek; and doctoral student Michael Mansfeld.</p><p>“The startup ecosystem is characterized by uncertainty and volatility compounded by growing uncertainties in climate and planetary systems,” Grönfeldt says. “Therefore, there is an urgent need for a robust model that can objectively predict startup success and guide design for the Anthropocene.”</p><p>While startup-success forecasting is gaining popularity, it currently focuses on aiding venture capitalists in selecting companies to fund, rather than guiding the startups in the design of their products, services and business plans.</p><p>“The coupling of climate and environmental priorities with startup agendas requires deeper analytics for effective enterprise design,” Grönfeldt says. The project aims to explore whether AI-augmented decision-support systems can enhance startup-success forecasting.</p><p>“We’re trying to develop a machine learning approach that will give a forecasting of probability of success based on a number of parameters, including the type of business model proposed, how the team came together, the team members’ backgrounds and skill sets, the market and industry sector they’re working in and the problem-solution fit,” says Bayomi, who works with Fernández in the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative. The two are co-founders of the startup Lamarr.AI, which employs robotics and AI to help reduce the carbon dioxide impact of the built environment.</p><p>The team is studying “how company founders make decisions across four key areas, starting from the opportunity recognition, how they are selecting the team members, how they are selecting the business model, identifying the most automatic strategy, all the way through the product market fit to gain an understanding of the key governing parameters in each of these areas,” explains Bayomi.</p><p>The team is “also developing a large language model that will guide the selection of the business model by using large datasets from different companies in Germany and the U.S. We train the model based on the specific industry sector, such as a technology solution or a data solution, to find what would be the most suitable business model that would increase the success probability of a company,” she says.</p><p>The project falls under several of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, including economic growth, innovation and infrastructure, sustainable cities and communities, and climate action.</p><p><strong>Furthering the goals of the HPI-MIT Joint Research Program</strong></p><p>These three diverse projects all advance the mission of the HPI-MIT collaboration. MIT MAD aims to use design to transform learning, catalyze innovation, and empower society by inspiring people from all disciplines to interweave design into problem-solving. HPI uses digital engineering concentrated on the development and research of user-oriented innovations for all areas of life.</p><p>Interdisciplinary teams with members from both institutions are encouraged to develop and submit proposals for ambitious, sustainable projects that use design strategically to generate measurable, impactful solutions to the world’s problems.</p>

<p>In higher education, MIT is best known for its world-class programs for undergraduate and graduate students. In addition, MIT’s Professional Education, MITx, and MITxPro, among others, have reached new audiences worldwide with MIT-caliber offerings. So have summer programs such as MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s BeaverWorks Summer Institute.</p>

<p>A new curriculum in development at MIT may soon open up learning opportunities for a new population of students — workers who are not necessarily college bound — to gain exposure to advanced technologies and industry-relevant expertise.</p>

<p>With collaborators at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, Clemson University, Cape Cod Community College, and in the future the manufacturing software firm Tulip, a group of MIT researchers is developing a new curriculum aimed at strengthening the nation’s manufacturing workforce. The project was recently awarded funding from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD)’s Innovation Capability and Modernization (ICAM) office and its Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment (IBAS) program.&nbsp;</p>

<p>In the manufacturing field, many students are natural tinkerers or standouts in their jobs, but aren’t seeking a four-year degree. The new curriculum, aimed at workers holding an associate’s degree or equivalent, will aim to build on their technical know-how by blending it with an engineer’s perspective on systems and processes.</p>

<p>”With increasing technological sophistication, the quickening pace of technology change, and ever-tightening standards, we need to incorporate quality education into manufacturing training programs,” says <a href=”https://meche.mit.edu/people/staff/johnhliu@mit.edu”>John&nbsp;Liu</a>, an MIT lecturer, co-principal investigator for the project, and director of MIT’s <a href=”https://leapgroup.mit.edu/”>Learning Engineering and Practice Group</a>. “By integrating MIT’s mind-and-hand approach to how we develop the manufacturing workforce, we can re-energize America’s factory floors, empower companies to move into advanced manufacturing, and support firms in adopting advanced manufacturing technologies.”</p>

<p>After talking to large and small companies, schools, workforce boards, manufacturing extension programs, and education and workforce experts, a team led by Liu and affiliated with the Manufacturing@MIT Working Group discovered a gap in training that Liu felt he could address. Many vo-tech schools and community colleges offer programs to help students fill technician roles. Companies, too, train technicians, some of whom they hire with no manufacturing background. No one, however, had a clean solution to give technicians a ladder to become shop-floor leaders; “technologists” would bridge the gap between technicians and engineers.&nbsp;</p>

<p>“Advanced manufacturing will not work unless it integrates production in new ways. This new program aims to educate a new kind of factory systems leader to undertake this,”&nbsp;says Bill Bonvillian, senior director of special projects for MIT Open Learning and a key member of the MIT team behind the technologist program. Bonvillian is coauthor of the book “Workforce Education: A New Roadmap.”</p>

<p>Earlier, Liu had facilitated the creation of the MITx <a href=”https://www.edx.org/masters/micromasters/mitx-principles-manufacturing”>Principles of Manufacturing Micromasters</a>, which covers processes, systems, supply chains, and management of manufacturing. <a href=”https://meche.mit.edu/people/faculty/hardt@mit.edu”>Dave Hardt</a>, MIT professor of mechanical engineering and the Ralph E. and Eloise F. Cross Professor in Manufacturing, along with other faculty in the MIT Master of Engineering in Advanced Manufacturing and Design (MEng) program distilled these four “principles of manufacturing” so they might be applied to any industry in manufacturing. Liu felt these same skills would be valuable for technicians who wanted to become shop-floor leaders, and that the new project team could create a new curriculum, but for a different audience. This material would go into the “hub” of the technologist curriculum. The team would then also build “spoke” material, in areas like robotics, additive manufacturing, and advanced CNC machining.</p>

<p>The technologist program fits a major need in advanced manufacturing. While engineers are trained in design, technicians are trained to operate particular processes, such as CNC machining or welding. Yet advanced manufacturing requires a new level of expertise — technologists who understand the systems on the factory floor, who can integrate the new technologies like robotics or additive manufacturing along with existing equipment, and apply data analytics to make the new system highly efficient. While engineers design and technicians operate, the technologist would be a bridge. Liu and Bonvillian make the case for this new technologist occupation <a href=”https://issues.org/technologist-advanced-manufacturing-workforce-liu-bonvillian/” target=”_blank”>in a new article</a> published by&nbsp;<em>Issues in Science and Technology</em>, a policy journal&nbsp;of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.</p>

<p>“The technologist program will be a major contribution to advancing the manufacturing workforce, which is arguably the greatest need of manufacturing companies of all sizes in the United States. It’s also a great example of collaboration between MIT, other institutions, industry, and government, and aligns incentives among stakeholders to create meaningful impact,” says <a href=”https://meche.mit.edu/people/faculty/ajhart@mit.edu”>John Hart</a>, who is head of the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering,&nbsp;co-director of the Manufacturing@MIT Working Group, and the PI for MIT’s part of the DoD-funded technologist program. “Manufacturing technologists will have exciting, advanced technology careers, and the IBAS program funding is instrumental in launching this program. It is an important opportunity for MIT, and our team led by Dr. John Liu and our collaborators, to extend MIT’s leadership in manufacturing education in a new realm,” explains Hart, who is also director of the Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity and director of the Center for Advanced Production Technologies.</p>

<p>The DoD’s ICAM office is supporting the multi-institutional project led by UMass Lowell with a $4.25 million investment over two years. MIT’s contributions to the program are supported by $3.09 million in DoD funding via a two-year subaward. Adele Ratcliff, ICAM office director, says, “The University of Massachusetts Lowell and MIT are creating a one-year advanced manufacturing technologist certificate curriculum and content aligned with our defense manufacturing industry needs. This technologist education will help with huge shortages in skilled labor facing many defense companies supporting critical manufacturing technologies for years to come. The technologist program is a natural blending of 2-year and 4-year manufacturing and engineering programs and curricula that is being driven largely by Industry 4.0 in the digital age, keenly recognizing the need to help foster that evolution.”</p>

<p>Collaborators at Clemson University will help design and build virtual reality simulations for the program, so students who might not have access to cutting-edge equipment can learn using virtual tools.&nbsp;</p>

<p>“Our goal at Clemson University is to create transformative learning experiences where students and incumbent workers, regardless of their access to state-of-the-art equipment, can engage with virtual digital learning tools. &nbsp;This initiative of reskilling and upskilling opportunities for all is essential to bolster U.S. competitiveness in an ever-evolving technological landscape,” says Kapil Chalil Madathil, the Wilfred P. Tiencken Professor of Industrial and Civil Engineering at Clemson University, director of the Clemson University Center for Workforce Development, and the PI for Clemson University’s part of this DoD-funded technologist program.</p>

<p>The Manufacturing@MIT Working Group is coordinating with an advisory council of several New England community colleges that would be ready to offer a year-long, blended-learning program, and when the curriculum is ready it will continue to seek funding to support the program’s rollout. Manufacturing@MIT has also collected scores of letters from companies that say they would be ready to pay a wage of at least $25 an hour to graduates of such a program.</p>

<p>“The new certificate program will help develop critical thinking and practical skills,” says Brad Mingels, director of workforce development for professional and undergraduate education at the Francis College of Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. “It should also help graduates advance in their careers and move on to more education and higher-paid jobs.”&nbsp;</p>

<p>Indeed, companies have told the Manufacturing@MIT group that not only would graduates of the technologist program provide a bridge between technicians and engineers, but they would also bring new, advanced manufacturing know-how to their factories. The education, toolsets, and mindsets that graduates will take away from the program will empower them to share their ideas, so those ideas might “bubble up” to companies’ engineers and management. The program will empower workers who faced opportunity and education gaps.</p>

<p>Alongside ICAM’s IBAS-funded program, Manufacturing@MIT is also working to scale its collaborations with companies and community colleges across the country. Individuals seeking more information can <a href=”https://meche.mit.edu/people/staff/johnhliu@mit.edu” target=”_blank”>contact John Liu</a>.</p>

<p>Now the work will begin to build the curriculum, which MIT and UMass Lowell plan to ultimately offer for free to any community college, company, or military production facility (including shipyards and arsenals) that wants to educate the next generation of technologists to become shop-floor leaders.</p>