March 27, 2013 – The Smart Manufacturing Leadership Coalition (SMLC)won a 2013 Clean Energy Manufacturing contract to start developing the nation’s first open smart manufacturing technology platform for collaborative industrial networked information applications. The innovative $10 million project, led by the SMLC, will receive $7.8 million in funding from the U.S.
Dept. of Energy Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy’s Advanced Manufacturing Program.
“Together, we intend to transform industrial productivity and energize a new era of innovation by empowering manufacturers with real-time, plantwide work-flow intelligence needed to deliver higher levels of game-changing competitiveness,” said Dean Bartles, SMLC chairman and SVP, General Dynamics. “Smart Manufacturing infrastructures and approaches will also let operators make real-time use of ‘big data’ flows from fully instrumented plants to improve safety, environmental impact and energy, water and materials use.
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, “We can reduce U.S. 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 carbon dioxide emissions by 69 million tons, and waste heat by 1.3 quads, or approximately 1.3 percent of total U.S. energy use.
Given the initial energy application focus for the Smart Manufacturing Platform, the principal investigator is Professor Thomas Edgar, director of the University of Texas at Austin Energy Institute and professor of chemical engineering. According to Tom Edgar, “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.”
With direction from the full membership of the SMLC, this project is a significant collaborative effort among Emerson Process Management, Honeywell Automation and Control Solutions, Invensys and Rockwell Automation to ensure the Smart Manufacturing Platform is compatible with multiple process control software systems and energy-applications apps. The American Institute of Chemical Engineers and the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences will develop standard metrics for energy-productivity apps and promote platform use to small, medium and large manufacturers. The industry-driven, open platform architecture, orchestrated work flows and operating design will be developed by UCLA’s Institute for Digital Research and Education (IDRE) and Nimbis Services, a new U.S.
-based, business-to-business cloud hosting services company for manufacturing.
"Twenty-first century Smart Manufacturing is manufacturing in which all needed information is available when it is needed, where it is needed, and in the form it is most useful" said Jim Davis, UCLA vice provost IT and CTO. "The SMLC encompasses the essential collaboration for bringing the massive potential of today’s digital information to America’s plants and factories as the speed of business is accelerating. There is an unprecedented convergence in the ability to work with big data, to simulate, model and predict with game-changing fidelity, and to access previously unimaginable information and markets.”
"Ideally, progressive business leaders will soon view their plants and factories as innovation hubs and profit centers to be invested in rather than just cost centers to be cut with such little strategic value that they sometimes have been outsourced overseas,” said Denise Swink, CEO of SMLC, Inc. “We expect the Smart Manufacturing Platform will unleash American ingenuity and engineering prowess in ways that are as unexpected as how the IT revolution has changed every other aspect of our lives.”
The SMLC is a non-profit organization comprised of manufacturing practitioner, supplier and technology companies; manufacturing consortia; universities; federal agency and government laboratories. The SMLC is committed to overcome barriers to the development and deployment of Smart Manufacturing (SM) Systems through an implementation agenda for building a scaled, shared infrastructure called the Smart Manufacturing Platform (SM Platform). SMLC activities are built around industry-driven development, application and scaling of a shared infrastructure that will achieve transformational economic-wide impact, manufacturing innovation and global competitiveness. SMLC supports the manufacturing industry through pursuing a comprehensive technology that no one company can undertake.
Without a modern industrial infrastructure, adoption of SM Systems is not economically viable. Process control and automation systems implemented in piecemeal fashion will continue to limit innovation and capability. SMLC will build the business, interoperability and technology models, demonstrations, infrastructure, and project teams across multiple industry segments.
