Research Areas
- Design automation, digital manufacturing, computer-aided manufacturing
- Design for environment, manufacturing cost modeling, sustainability assessment
- Computational modeling of manufacturing processes, materials forming, optically assisted manufacturing
- Powder metallurgy, metal additive manufacturing, design and manufacturing of high temperature alloys
- Design for manufacturing, materials joining, microchannel lamination, microreactor-assisted nanomaterial and thin film synthesis
- Machine tool dynamics and control, modeling and analysis of machining processes
Advanced Manufacturing research in the School of MIME is highly interdisciplinary in nature spanning the fields of mechanical design, engineering mechanics, fluid dynamics, heat and mass transfer, thermodynamics, and materials science and involving both experimental and computational efforts. Depending on the nature of the research, graduate students pursue degrees in Industrial Engineering, Mechanical Engineering or Materials Science.
Advanced Manufacturing graduate students experience a rich, interdisciplinary environment supported by numerous research collaborations. We leverage academic opportunities by partnering with other engineering schools at Oregon State including Chemical, Biological and Environmental Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Wood Science and Engineering. As well, we work closely within state-level collaboratives such as VertueLab and ONAMI (Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute).
Our faculty have continuous engagement with industry; our partners include Arburg, Boeing, Blount, Benchmade, CH2M Hill, ESI, Hewlett Packard, Intel, North American Hoganas and Tektronix. Research investigations often span over nano-micro-macro length scales.
Our vision is to improve cost efficiency, productivity, quality and flexibility in current manufacturing paradigms, as well as conceive, investigate and develop novel hybrid manufacturing techniques to enable the commercial realization of emerging products. Effective unit-process innovation and development derives from an understanding of the physical and chemical phenomena influencing manufacturing processes. Therefore, a key part of our research involves the creation and experimental validation of computational models of the physics behind tool-material interactions in manufacturing processes, as well as the modeling and understanding of machine tool dynamics and tool-machine interactions. This fundamental knowledge is supplemented with the study of the metrology and characterization techniques needed to monitor the quality of manufacturing production.
Current areas of investigation in the field of process innovation and development at the Advanced Technology and Manufacturing Institute, a key research facility for the Advanced Manufacturing group, include:
- Additive manufacturing for low-cost tooling
- Machine tool dynamics and controls
- Materials forming
- Double-sided incremental forming of metals and polymers
- Microforming of superalloys
- Materials joining
- Diffusion bonding and brazing
- Laser welding
- Vacuum brazing
- Compression sealing
- Nanomaterial synthesis
- Microwave-assisted synthesis of quantum dots
- Solution-phase nanomaterial deposition for thin film photovoltaics
- Photonic sintering techniques
- Powder and polymer injection molding
- Precision and electrically-assisted machining
At the systems level, we utilize bottom-up cost and material–energy flow analyses of manufacturing systems to evaluate the economics and environmental impacts of competing manufacturing routes with the goal to streamline manufacturing production in the digital world prior to capital investment. Current research related to manufacturing systems includes:
- Design for manufacturing
- Energy studies in manufacturing
- Sustainable manufacturing assessment
- Manufacturing cost modeling
- Design automation
- Digital manufacturing
