SHARE
Blog

ORNL shares its know-how

Local Motors CEO Jay Rogers became the first person to drive the first 3-D printed car on September 13, 2014.

Built on site at the International Manufacturing Technology Show in Chicago over the previous six days, the vehicle—known as a Strati—demonstrated the ability of a national laboratory to rapidly develop transformative new technology.

It also underscored the benefits of lab collaboration with private industry. Production of the Strati depended not only on the materials science and advanced manufacturing expertise at ORNL’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility; it also required Ohio manufacturer Cincinnati Inc.’s big-area advanced manufacturing know-how and Local Motors’ design skills.

The collaboration did not end with the Strati. For all of ORNL’s technology prowess, the lab is not a commercial manufacturer; that job belongs to Local Motors, which is building a “microfactory” for 3-D printed vehicles just a few miles from the MDF.

The company plans to produce “neighborhood” vehicles by early 2016 and highway-ready vehicles later in the year. Within five years it plans to have 50 such microfactories. These are ambitious goals made possible by the company’s collaboration with ORNL.

“Local Motors is going to commercialize this technology,” Rogers explained, “but it needs help so we can make it work. There are a lot of people at the lab who can help make this happen.”

ORNL’s relationship with Local Motors is especially visible, but it is just one of many that the lab has developed with companies across the United States and even around the world.

ORNL has actively promoted commercial use of lab-created technology throughout its seven-decade history. The lab made its first shipment of medical isotopes—radioactive materials used to diagnose and treat diseases—in 1946.

These are especially good days for economic development and technology transfer, however. The lab, operated by the University of Tennessee and Battelle Memorial Institute, enjoys strong support from state government and partner institutions as well as ORNL’s parent agency— the U.S. Department of Energy. And lab staff actively seek partnerships to improve their research and broaden its reach.

Public funding, public responsibility

For ORNL, the explanation for this approach is simple: a lab created and operated with public funding has a responsibility to share the fruits of its work.

“When we’re making the case for taxpayer funding, that’s based on a return,” explained ORNL Laboratory Director Thom Mason. “There’s a promise to society that says, ‘If you invest in this research there will be paybacks in terms of improvements to health, improvements to standard of living, improvements to quality of life, improvements to the environment, because of the results of that research.’

“And that promise only becomes real when the research makes its way out of the lab or the university and into the hands of the private sector. We don’t make anything. We don’t sell anything. We want our research to get into the hands of people who do.”

The lab works with private businesses in many ways. At the local and regional level, ORNL collaborates with the state and UT to nurture technology-focused businesses, especially firms that produce or use carbon fiber and those that use additive manufacturing—another term for 3-D printing. Carbon fiber and additive manufacturing are particular strengths for ORNL, and the lab works hard to make life a little easier for companies in these industries doing business in Tennessee.

In the larger economy, ORNL works to get lab-created technologies into the private sector, where they can create and improve lives. Each year the lab receives about 70 patents and enters new licensing agreements with about 20 businesses. In addition, the lab makes its unique facilities available to researchers from private industry. These include the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, whose Titan system is the world’s second-most-

powerful supercomputer, and the Spallation Neutron Source, which provides the most intense pulsed neutron beams in the world to examine materials and biological systems.

Business clusters

In March, the state of Tennessee announced it would provide $2.5 million

for a voucher program—dubbed RevV!— that allows businesses to collaborate with researchers at the lab.

According to Tom Rogers, ORNL’s director of industrial partnerships and economic development, the program shows that Tennessee officials understand ORNL’s potential as a magnet for high-tech business.

“We’re becoming top-of-mind for our state and regional economic development leaders,” he said. “Hardly a week goes by that we don’t get a call saying, ‘We’re recruiting a company, and we think working with the laboratory might be a differentiator for them, and so will you get involved?’”

This realization has brought ORNL into some high-profile recruiting efforts, he said, including the siting of an $800 million plant for South Korean tire maker Hankook Tire in Middle Tennessee that will employ 1,800 people, a new location for Beretta Firearms, also in Middle Tennessee, that will employ 300 people, and most recently a new facility for Cirrus Aircraft in East Tennessee that will create 170 new jobs.

But the focus of ORNL’s regional efforts comes from something known as a cluster strategy, first proposed by Michael Porter of Harvard University. The cluster concept is to build a geographic concentration of interconnected businesses, suppliers, and research institutions to increase the capacity for companies to compete, and in so doing create a strong regional competitive advantage. Examples of successful clusters include California’s Silicon Valley and North Carolina’s Research Triangle.

Carbon fiber: strong, lightweight, good business

Materials based on carbon fiber are wonders: light as plastic and stronger than steel. ORNL’s Rogers said they can help the American auto industry meet rigorous fuel economy standards that are

“What we’re doing is leveraging ORNL’s capabilities,” Rogers explained. “We spent a lot of time developing a commercialization strategy for carbon fiber, so we really understand the whole value chain, from feedstocks, to fibers, to different composites, all the way to end-use applications.”

Because of ORNL’s expertise, the cluster has gotten the attention of some important players. The Oak Ridge Carbon Fiber Composites Consortium began in 2011 with 14 members and has grown to well over 50, including industry giants such as 3M, BASF, Dow Chemical, General Electric and Ford Motor Company.

ORNL also promotes the cluster by collaborating on workforce training efforts with nearby Roane State Community College.

More recently, President Obama announced in January 2015 that the University of Tennessee at Knoxville will lead the $250 million Institute for Advanced Composites Manufacturing Innovation—or IACMI—a public–private partnership with substantial backing from DOE. Rogers noted that the carbon fiber consortium will be absorbed into IACMI

Additive manufacturing— progress in three dimensions

Additive manufacturing—once just the 3-D printing of prototypers and hobbyists—has also made it to the big time. To help prove the point, ORNL collaborated with Cincinnati Inc. to print a replica of the classic Shelby Cobra sports car and unveiled it at the 2015 North American International Auto Show in Detroit. Components containing carbon fiber made up more than a third of its 1,400 pounds.

The Shelby was produced at MDF, where ORNL provides tools for designing and evaluating new products, reducing the time taken up by prototyping. Besides additive manufacturing, the facility focuses on technologies such as carbon fiber and composites, lightweight metals processing and magnetic field processing, where strong magnetic fields and high heat are used to improve material properties such as strength and toughness.

ORNL partners with nearby Pellissippi State Community College to provide workforce training in advanced manufacturing, and the University of Tennessee has a Governor’s Chair in the field—Sudarsanam Suresh Babu, a materials scientist who serves in the university’s Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Biomedical Engineering and its Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

Mason pointed to the importance of collaboration among business and government leaders in promoting economic competitiveness.

“I think it makes us stronger as a national lab when we have an innovation ecosystem here,” said Mason, long-time chairman of the Knoxville–Oak Ridge Innovation Valley, a regional partnership of economic development groups.

“We have a research university, we have a private sector that’s interested in what we’re doing and engaged in trying to take our ideas to market,” Mason said, pointing out that such partnerships directly benefit ORNL, too. “It helps us serve our national missions.”

See also: