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Welcome to the Manufacturing Moment, a monthly dose of advanced manufacturing updates hot off the factory floor.
This month’s newsletter includes upcoming deadlines, funding announcements, project and program highlights, a Q&A interview, events to join, news you may have missed, and job openings. Estimated reading time: 7 minutes.
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Reach out to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office (AMMTO) at ammto@ee.doe.gov with any manufacturing musings. |
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Upcoming Deadlines
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Funding Corner
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Last week, AMMTO issued a notice of intent for a $33 million funding opportunity focused on smart manufacturing technologies needed for the nation’s clean energy transition. Through this funding opportunity, AMMTO will seek high-impact applied research, development and demonstration projects that will accelerate the adoption of smart manufacturing technologies and processes, helping domestic manufacturers create new, integrated systems and support their competitiveness around the world. The DOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) plans to announce the funding opportunity around June 2024, with more details to follow.
Earlier this month, AMMTO issued a $8.3 million lab call for proposals to further data, analysis, and modeling tools. Supported data collection and analyses will focus on current clean energy market and technology landscapes, as well as historical impacts of investments. The development of models that formalize and automate the data analyses will establish frameworks that will be able to be leveraged in the future as additional technologies related to the eight topics of this lab call are considered for investment. This lab call will also develop systems of tools that inform actions to accelerate commercialization, increase circularity, and/or increase resilience in the supply chains that support clean energy.
Phase 2 of the Re-X Before Recycling Prize is now open to new and returning competitors! With $1.5 million in total prize money and $1 million in technical assistance for analysis available, this prize offers innovators the opportunity to transform waste into valuable resources through re-x. Competitors will also have the opportunity to get expert analysis from national laboratories, revise plans, and connect with mentors and partners.
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Highlights
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Google Headlines Earth Day Pledge Signing
AMMTO celebrated Earth Day by adding an impressive list of signees to its Energy Efficiency Scaling for 2 Decades initiative ‘pledge,’ which commits organizations to energy efficiency in the semiconductor industry. Currently, the two biggest applications of semiconductors are communications and computing, therefore increasing the energy efficiency of semiconductors would greatly reduce power demand to data centers. Google Chief Sustainability Officer Kate Brandt led the virtual signing ceremony that included Vital Integration of Environmental Electronics CEO Sebastian Ventrone, Los Angeles Trade Technical College’s Velveth Klee, and Florida Semiconductor Institute Director Volker J. Sorger. With this latest signing, the pledge now has 65 signees across private industry, national labs, and academia. The ultimate goal of the initiative is to increase the energy efficiency of semiconductors 1,000-fold over the next 20 years by doubling energy efficiency biennially.
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This month, REMADE held its annual summit and conference in Washington, D.C., focused on accelerating our nation’s transition to a circular economy, with attendees including industry innovators, academic researchers, university students, and federal agencies. On the first day, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Jeff Marootian gave remarks on the work being done across DOE to advance a circular economy, including the opening of Phase 2 of the Re-X Before Recycling Prize.
On the second day, AMMTO Director Chris Saldaña participated in a federal panel that explored the importance of circularity to the missions of different agencies. And later in the morning, Deputy Assistant Secretary Carolyn Snyder discussed in more detail the critical role circularity plays in our nation’s clean energy efforts, and the work being done in DOE’s Buildings and Industry space to advance a circular economy. Throughout the event the excitement of the attendees to be part of a broader circularity effort was evident, and the message was clear: Collaboration across the supply chain is key to transitioning our nation to a circular economy.
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United States Council for Automotive Research’s Smart Manufacturing Workshop
On April 15, 2024, AMMTO leadership represented DOE at the United States Council for Automotive Research’s Smart Manufacturing Workshop. During the workshop, AMMTO Director Chris Saldaña discussed how smart manufacturing will play a major role in addressing the manufacturing challenges for the clean energy transition. He also announced AMMTO’s notice of intent to issue a $33 million funding opportunity focused on smart manufacturing technologies, which will be announced around June 2024. CESMII (the Smart Manufacturing Institute) launched a Roadmap for Automotive Smart Manufacturing. Supported by Ford Motor Company, General Motors, and Stellantis, the roadmap outlines the need for standards-based openness and interoperability of platforms and applications to enable a more productive, competitive, and resilient automotive manufacturing environment in the United States.
Researchers from DOE’s Waterborne Plastics Assessment and Collection Technologies are on a mission to develop renewable-energy-powered technologies to detect, quantify, and collect plastic from U.S. waterways. The project aims to reduce the volume of plastic currently entering the ocean annually via U.S. waterways by more than half by 2040. The project addresses the size and scope of the plastic pollution problem by studying how it flows through U.S. riverside communities, identifying the visible pollution, and investigating the “invisible” pollution called microplastics.
In partnership, the Bio-Optimized Technologies to keep Thermoplastics out of Landfills and the Environment (BOTTLE) consortium is building on this research to prevent plastics from ever becoming pollution by reclaiming the finite resources in the current mixed plastic waste, and redesigning plastics to improve their recyclability. BOTTLE is co-funded by AMMTO and DOE’s Bioenergy Technologies Office.
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DOE recently announced the winners for the concept phase of the Community Energy Innovation Prize, which provides financial rewards and mentorship opportunities to organizations supporting innovation, entrepreneurship, capacity building, and economic development in communities historically underrepresented in climate and energy technology funding. AMMTO is funding the Manufacturing Ecosystem Track, which announced 10 projects that will be awarded $100,000 in prize money and receive in-kind mentorship and other support services throughout the subsequent prize phases. The concept teams will now form their coalitions and develop project ideas, and winners of this phase will be eligible to move onto the progress and impact phases.
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AMMTO Director Chris Saldaña was in Germany this week at Hannover Messe, a leading international trade show, to witness an exciting development in the future of battery supply chains. Manufacturing USA Institute CESMII and OPC Foundation—an industry consortium that creates and maintains standards for open connectivity of industrial automation devices and systems—demonstrated the Battery Passport at the OPC Unified Architecture booth. The Battery Passport is a digital record of all aspects of a battery with data ranging from raw materials, components, production, performance, and life cycle. Built on the success of the existing Digital Product Passport and Product Carbon Footprint demonstrator, the Battery Passport will be critical in defining future battery supply chains, and better understanding the sustainability of the components and materials that comprise them.
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Making It!
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Our office just launched the Making It! series, which spotlights the fresh perspectives of our fantastic fellows, who are making next-generation materials and manufacturing processes possible for our clean energy future.
In the first profile, we chatted with Michelle Seitz, an American Association for the Advancement of Science fellow. At AMMTO, she’s working to create a circular economy for the United States—in which plastics and other materials can be remanufactured, recycled, or otherwise reused rather than thrown in the trash.
“Everything is made from something,” Seitz said. “So, how can we make it better, stronger, and last longer?”
Read the Q&A interview to learn how her MIT literature professor changed the way Seitz approached science, why she worked in the Netherlands for 11 years, and why she cares so much about improving recycling.
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Upcoming Events
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Join West Gate and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory at Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Program (LEEP) Demo Day! LEEP will showcase promising cleantech entrepreneurs who are developing transformative energy technologies. This event will feature exhibits and pitches from 21 participating startups, keynote speaker Justin Whiteley (co-founder and senior technical advisor of Meati Foods) and remarks from EERE Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Jeff Marootian.
 May 9 and May 29, 2024: Power Electronics Roadmap Webinars
We are excited to invite you to the upcoming Power Electronics Roadmap Listening Sessions. These sessions are part of our efforts to draft a roadmap that will better identify performance, lifetime, and cost metrics for future power electronics systems in the next 10–12 years. Additionally, the roadmap will provide an assessment of the potential impact that innovations in power electronics can have on our clean energy economy. Upcoming dates:
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In Case You Missed It
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