How Predictive Innovation will Change Manufacturing Forever

National Center for Manufacturing Sciences - NCMS is developing a national innovation network: a knowledge infrastructure which leverages the wealth of talent, ideas and facilities within our nation’s universities, national labs and industrial research centers so that we can innovate smarter, faster, and more predictably.

Focusing on advanced manufacturing, product design, and development, the network will consist of numerous public/private sector collaborations called Predictive Innovation Centers (PICs). These centers will leverage the resources of industry, government, and academia to accelerate our innovation pace in the 21st Century knowledge race. The PIC network, comprised of a handful of application specific, regional centers with the expertise to facilitate the collaboration, will bridge the gap between traditional manufacturing and 21st century predictive processes, enabling high speed collaboration, innovation, and commercialization.


As project facilitator, NCMS will transfer HPC technology opportunities to industry, and support the network of Predictive Innovation Centers. The program focus will be on a broad, cross-cutting technology that improves access and increases the value of high performance computing modeling and simulation tools. The program will leverage the existing technology and capability at George Washington University’s National Crash Analysis Center (GWU/NCAC) for the first PIC.

In partnership with GWU/NCAC, L&L Products, Inc. and Ontonix, NCMS will validate a robust process to evaluate subsystem/component models, compare with quasi-static test data, determine level of correlation/validation, and document areas within the model where improvements (greater correlation) can be achieved.

This work is fundamental for potential future efforts to evaluate such variables as larger model size, strain rate effect, and other factors that are not captured in this initial project. The project is begins in February 2010 and will be completed in December 2010. Future project phases will lead to the development of additional specialized PICs across the nation.