Illinois took home several accolades at last week’s MSEC/NAMRC (North American Manufacturing Research Conference), one of the premier manufacturing research conferences in the world.

Assistant Professor Chenhui Shao won second place in the conference’s RAMP competition (Reusable Abstractions of Manufacturing Processes), for his entry titled, “Manufacturing of an Innovative Hybrid Heat Exchanger.” Shao’s graduate student Yuquan Meng was the lead researcher for the work, which is part of the DOE-funded project that seeks to discover how best to combine inexpensive polymers with metals to obtain an economically viable heat exchanger that has better thermal and thermomechanical performance than existing hybrids. The study is a collaboration among Shao and MechSE professors Placid Ferreira, Nenad Miljkovic, Srinivasa Salapaka, and Sanjiv Sinha (PI).

The competition focused on the modeling of manufacturing processes for system-level sustainability assessment, and is intended to foster interest in characterizing manufacturing processes, leading to a common set of descriptive models and performance metrics that support effective and consistent system-level analysis and comparisons spanning various manufacturing processes and resources. Models can span from traditional scale down to nanoscale processes and be based on mechanical, electrical, chemical, biochemical, and biotechnologies. This year’s theme was Model Reusability.

Additionally, doctoral candidate Ping-Ju Chen won second place in NAMRC’s Student Research Presentation competition. Chen is a student in Ferreira’s research group. Her winning paper, “An Experimental Investigation into Plate-to-Roll Patterning with Solid-State Superionic Stamping,” was also authored by Boqiang Qian, Shama F. Barna, Glennys Mensing, and Ferreira. 

NAMRC is recognized as North America’s preeminent and longest-running international forum for applied research and industrial applications in manufacturing and design. Coordinated by the North American Manufacturing Research Institution of SME (NAMRI/SME), the conference has been held annually since 1973.  This year’s conference was held June 10-14 at Penn State in Erie, PA.