Roadmapping Continues in Fluid Power Advanced Manufacturing Workshop

The rapid advance of new manufacturing technologies, such as additive and hybrid manufacturing, provides exciting opportunities to improve the performance, reliability, and cost of many products.  To address these opportunities, the Center for Compact and Efficient Fluid Power (CCEFP) brought together experts from industry, academia, and national labs for a Fluid Power Advanced Manufacturing Workshop on May 24 & 25, 2016. Participants at the workshop included more than a dozen invited speakers from industry and academia and a total of more than 30 registrants.

The purpose of the workshop was to help alleviate existing gaps in the knowledge and methodologies required to bring new fluid power system concepts to design, modeling and analysis, and finally to manufacturing. Such a gap will limit the innovations of new systems or applications and the impact of advanced manufacturing technologies. A critical yet overlooked process is how to integrate the model-based design and analysis with the advanced manufacturing technologies to evaluate and optimize system efficiency and performance at an early stage. The streamlining of the design, analysis, and manufacturing processes will not only reduce cost but also provide an attractive platform for researchers from industry, academia and national labs to collaborate in fluid power innovation.

To address these issues, the group worked to identify the pre-competitive research objectives and approaches of integrating manufacturing innovations with model-based design and analysis that would enable development of new fluid power systems and applications. The ultimate output from this workshop will be a white paper that will facilitate this collaboration by identifying key topics for research.

The workshop was sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation, Manufacturing Machines and Equipment (MME) Program.  For additional information, see https://sites.google.com/a/umn.edu/fpamc/nsf-mme-workshop.