Staff from Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, and Oak Ridge national laboratories taking part in the American Energy and Manufacturing Competitiveness Summit are, left to right: LBNL’s Horst Simon, LLNL’s Trish Damkroger, ORNL’s John Turner, HPC4Mfg program director Peg Folta, NERSC’s David Skinner, LLNL’s Dona Crawford, and LLNL’s Jeff Roberts
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is collaborating with Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories (LLNL and LBNL) on a new US Department of Energy (DOE) program designed to fund and foster public-private R&D projects that enhance US competitiveness in clean energy manufacturing.
The High Performance Computing for Manufacturing Program (HPC4Mfg) was announced by David Danielson, DOE assistant secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, during the third annual American Energy and Manufacturing Competitiveness Summit (AEMC). The HPC4Mfg program couples U.S. manufacturers with the labs’ world-class computational R&D expertise and advanced computing resources to address key challenges in U.S. manufacturing whose solutions will have broad industry and national impact. HPC4Mfg will make up to $5 million available to national laboratories to work with qualified industry partners.
The two-day AEMC summit, sponsored by the Council on Competitiveness and the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, brought together DOE officials, national lab leaders and top U.S. manufacturing CEOs to discuss critical energy and manufacturing challenges and opportunities affecting U.S. prosperity, sustainability and security.
The further enriches DOE’s Clean Energy Manufacturing Initiative (CEMI), launched three years ago to strengthen U.S. competitiveness in the production of clean energy products and boost U.S. manufacturing competitiveness across the board by increasing energy productivity.
“The Manufacturing Demonstration Facility (MDF) has worked with numerous industry partners to overcome challenges in areas of advanced manufacturing, and ORNL is excited by the prospect of extending and accelerating this success through modeling and simulation,” said John Turner, Group Leader for Computational Engineering and Energy Sciences and ORNL lead for HPC4Mfg. He added, “We look forward to collaborating with colleagues at LLNL and LBNL, and with industry partners, to apply our computational expertise to challenging clean energy manufacturing problems.”
Suzy Tichenor, director for ORNL’s HPC Industrial Partnerships program, added, “The HPC4Mfg program complements our ACCEL (Accelerating Competitiveness through Computational Excellence) program by focusing specifically on barriers to energy-efficient manufacturing.”
Through ACCEL, many companies already have been working with the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a DOE Office of Science User Facility located at ORNL, to advance energy efficiency, energy reliability and energy productivity, as well as address other industrial challenges, through advanced modeling and simulation.
For example, the SmartTruck Corporation used OLCF resources to design low-cost, add-on parts for long-haul (class 8) trucks. Trailers equipped with all components can achieve between 7–12 percent improvements in fuel economy. By using modeling and simulation, SmartTruck reduced their time from concept to a manufacture-ready design by 50 percent.
Thus far in 2015, 34 industrial projects have been using the computational resources at the OLCF.
The HPC4Mfg program is supported by the DOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Advanced Manufacturing Office (AMO). AMO supports applied research, development and demonstration of new materials and processes for energy efficiency in manufacturing as well as platform technologies for the manufacturing of clean energy products. AMO provides support for ORNL’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility, a public-private partnership to engage industry with national labs.
ORNL is managed by UT-Battelle for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.
