Reed's Ruminations: A Blog by Dan Reed

Iowa and the Digital Lab for Manufacturing

Yesterday, I had the privilege to be at the White House as President Obama announced the Digital Lab for Manufacturing (the Digital Lab), a new partnership in the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation (NNMI). Led by the University of Illinois, the Digital Lab includes the University of Iowa, as well as Iowa State University and the University of Northern Iowa, as part of a national network of 40 industry partners, and 30+ academia, government, and community partners, and an additional 500+ supporting companies and organizations. The Digital Lab was awarded $70M from the U.S. Department of Defense and will be supported by an additional $250M in matching funds from industry and academia.

The focus of the NNMI and the Digital Lab is increasing the competitiveness of the U.S. manufacturing industry via industry-academic-government partnerships. This coalition will exploit advanced digital design and 3-D visualization, computational modeling and resilient design and manufacturing process optimization to maximize efficiency and minimize design and manufacturing costs.

To say that U.S manufacturing has been under great stress would be the understatement of the decade. Manufacturing plants have shuttered, middle class jobs have been lost, and communities have suffered. We cannot roll back the clock to the halcyon days of the past, but neither must we accept the inevitability of manufacturing declines and globalization. There is a way forward, one based on digital manufacturing technologies and industry-academic partnerships that can create new high-paying manufacturing jobs for Iowa and American workers. As I have written in other contexts, engaged public-private partnerships, where research universities and the private sector work in close partnership to address real-world problems via business and technology partnerships, are the keys to competitive success in the 21^st century global knowledge economy.

Iowa Implications

Manufacturing, both large and small, is an anchor of the Iowa economy. In fact, Iowa ranks very near the top of U.S. states in manufacturing. That is not a surprise to those of us in Iowa, but it may be a revelation to others. From Rockwell-Collins (high technology) through Lennox (furnaces and air conditioners) and Pella (windows and doors) to farm equipment (Kinze and Deere), manufacturing is one of Iowa's strengths – now and in the future.

It is essential we help these and other Iowa companies, large and small, remain successful and completive in a global economy. The Digital Lab, and Iowa's partnership with it, will give Iowa companies even greater access to engineering, information technologies, and computer-aided-design (CAD) expertise as part of regional and national collaborations.

In particular, Professor Karim Abdel-Malek, director of the Center for Computer Aided Design, is the Digital Labs project director for the Iowa team. He and his colleagues in the College of Engineering will bring their expertise in modeling and simulation of humans and of electromechanical systems, data visualization and virtual reality, and materials processing to the Digital Lab partnership. Examples of that expertise include:

• Virtual testing via simulation to understand equipment failure modes due to vibration and wear, enabling design for resilience, reducing repair costs and down time
• Software tools and simulations to minimize the number of design iterations and prototypes before manufacturing, reducing costs
• Additive manufacturing (3-D printing) of prototypes and parts, allowing efficient, low-cost, custom design of small volume parts
• Digital manufacturing for Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) of defense systems and extension to partner manufacturing companies
• Human-device interaction (human factors) for design and manufacturing
• Education and training opportunities for Iowa students and workers at all levels in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields

Why I'm Excited

I am excited about the Digital Lab for many reasons. The most important is the opportunity it affords for the University of Iowa and Iowa companies to participate in one of the country's leading initiatives in manufacturing. Working together, we can strengthen Iowa businesses, create exciting and well-paying new manufacturing jobs, and attract and retain talent across the state.

The second is more personal. Many of my old friends and former colleagues from the University of Illinois lead the Digital Lab. As one of its former directors, I was also delighted that the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) will play a leading role in applying advanced computing to manufacturing. This reflects both the capabilities of the center, host to one of the world's fastest computers, and its long history of industrial partnerships.

This is a great opportunity – for all of us.

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Celestial Mechanics: Why I Know Summer Will Come

My second floor office overlooks a delightful pedestrian mall lined with restaurants and shops. Strategically placed outdoor benches entice patrons and passersby to linger, converse and savor the ambience of a Midwestern college town. In the spring and fall, it is a venue filled with music, conversation and laughter.

Alas, as the continental United States remains in the ironfisted grip of a seemingly endless, harsh winter, the benches are snow covered and empty. The bundled pedestrians stride wearily forward, eyes squinted in a thousand yard stare as they seek solace from the prairie wind and cold. As Frost poetically observed, they have promises to keep, and miles to go before they sleep.

Trust the Science

Though the long past, languid days of northern latitude summer now seem like a waking dream, I have faith – grounded in science – that summer will come again. This oblate spheroid of revolution (aka a reference ellipsoid) we call planet Earth will again bring the warmth of summer to northern climes. (We can thank Isaac Newton's Principia for the proof that a rotating self-gravitating fluid body takes the form of an oblate spheroid of revolution.)

All of us are tempted to believe that seasonal variations are due to the varying distance of the Earth from the sun – its orbital eccentricity. It seems intuitive and obvious, but it is incorrect. The eccentricity of the Earth's orbit is quite small. Even more interestingly, the Earth is closest to the Sun on January 3, the periapsis of its orbit. The real cause of the seasons is the 23.5-degree axial tilt of the Earth relative to its orbital plane around the sun.

As the Earth orbits the sun, its tilted axis always points in the same direction. During part of the year, the northern hemisphere (that's us) is tilted toward the sun, yielding longer days and more direct sunlight; that is our summer. During our winter, the southern hemisphere tilts toward the sun, giving it summer and a now frigid winter to those of us in the north. As Newton showed and Einstein later expanded, in a few months, gravity and orbital mechanics will bring summer back again. A helpful NASA cartoon explains why this is the case.

STEM Education Really Matters

If you did not know the orbital cause of the seasons or had forgotten it, then you are in good company. In a famous, some might say infamous, 1987 study, a group of education researchers asked newly minted Harvard graduates to explain the cause of the seasons. As this brief video shows, most of them answered incorrectly, despite years of K-12 and college-level science and mathematics classes.

As my friend, Neil deGrasse Tyson, once wryly remarked, "The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it." Natural processes proceed with or without our understanding, but they are discoverable via systematic application of the scientific method – formulating hypotheses and testing them via repeatable and verifiable experiments.

I am not suggesting that everyone should be a scientist or engineer. A detailed understanding of celestial mechanics will not affect your job prospects (unless you are an aspiring astronomer), but in a global economy, a working knowledge of basic science, engineering and mathematics and a systematic approach to problem solving certainly will. Equally importantly, public policy issues, whether in health care, transportation, communications or energy, increasingly rest on scientific principles and shared understanding that must inform our collective debate and decision-making.

In technology-driven world, effective Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education is crucial for all of our students. We must do a better job of inculcating fundamental scientific principles and their practical applications, moving science and mathematics education beyond dry facts and formulas to vibrant and predictive experiential learning. Science education, when done right, is fun, filled with joy and passion for discovery and understanding. That's one of the great beauties of science; anyone can apply the scientific method and independently verify scientific claims.

Spring will come again, as surely as the Earth orbits the sun. Meanwhile, I am counting the days until the vernal equinox brings the sound of laughter back to the pedestrian mall.

Economics and University Partnerships

The Iowa City Press Citizen recently published an opinion piece that was a précis of my recent Iowa City Chamber of Commerce after dinner speech. In both the speech and the opinion piece, I discussed the 50^th anniversary of the War on Poverty, the need for lifelong education and engaged public-private partnerships.

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