Planning Grant: Engineering Research Center for Integrative Manufacturing and Remanufacturing Technologies (iMart) to Spur Rural Development

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The Planning Grants for Engineering Research Centers competition was run as a pilot solicitation within the ERC program. Planning grants are not required as part of the full ERC competition, but intended to build capacity among teams to plan for convergent, center-scale engineering research.This project envisions a shift of cradle-to-grave manufacturing paradigm to grave-to-cradle remanufacturing paradigm. Grave-to-cradle remanufacturing will enable the transformation of a part in various possible damage conditions to a certified product that can be reintroduced into the stream of commerce. Remanufacturing, which often leads to cost savings, is characterized by lower quantity, a large variety of materials and parts, and diversity of initial conditions (damage). Rural areas have great potential to address associated challenges due to lower costs of labor and land and the wide variety of available manufacturing capabilities and suppliers. This planning grant proposal is to foster and facilitate the planning of an ERC for Integrative Manufacturing and Remanufacturing Technologies (iMart ERC) to spur rural development and form convergent research collaborations. The vision of iMart ERC is to establish strong supply-chain networks by achieving integrative remanufacturing and manufacturing capabilities in rural areas in the US. The transformative mission of iMart is to 1) explore a new science of integrative remanufacturing supply chains; 2) enable remanufacturing automation toward certification; 3) transform the iMart supply chain system by seamlessly integrating data science, additive manufacturing, and remanufacturing automation into iMart remanufacturing; 4) engage stakeholders in the rich environment deliberately developed within the ERC; 5) integrate a competitive remanufacturing supply chain among rural areas, and train and retrain workers within a sustainable working environment while promoting rural area revitalization; and 6) assess and address issues related to safety, security, human factors, certification, environmental, societal acceptance, life cycle mass, and energy savings in remanufacturing. Lack of automation not only results in higher remanufacturing cost, but also introduces inconsistencies in remanufacturing quality, which dramatically reduces users? incentive to use restored parts. The novelty of the proposed iMart ERC will develop the enabling technologies and bring fully automated capability into the remanufacturing industry. Such a capability will lead to a dramatic improvement in remanufacturing consistency, thus yielding general acceptance of remanufacturing. The iMart ERC will overcome barriers through the trans-disciplinary research expertise, industrial partners, and innovation facilitators by advancing the proposed fundamental knowledge and innovative enabling technologies. The planning grant will bring in all stakeholders to devise a seamless plan for implementing the iMart ERC, with the goal of creating transformative product remanufacturing technologies that are cost-effective, yet significantly improve the quality, reliability, availability, and certification of remanufacturing. The integrative remanufacturing processes involve a large amount of data needed for the representation of products and processes. Investigating the use of data science to address challenges associated with safety, security, certification, environment, societal acceptance, and life cycle in remanufacturing will provide indepth convergence knowledge. Thus the iMart ERC also combines current convergent themes in Harnessing the Data Revolution and Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.