The Metal Casting and Foundry 4.0 centers employ students and solve industry problems
Iowa has a hidden gem that provides practical learning for students and innovative advice for the metal casting and foundry industry, leaders said.
They are talking about the Metal Casting and Foundry 4.0 centers, located on University of Northern Iowa’s campus and the TechWorks building in Waterloo, respectively.
The Metal Casting Center is a “nationally recognized leader in foundry research, applied technology and technical business assistance,” according to its website. The Foundry 4.0 Center conducts research and development for the manufacturing industry.
“The two things I’m most excited about is: No. 1, to showcase the talent of the group that’s down there, and what we can do with additive manufacturing,” said Stewart Carter, UNI’s chief applied engineering administrator. “But also one of the things I want to leverage that we haven’t in the past is getting our students more engaged to going down there and getting practical learning.”
When students go to the TechWorks facility, which is where the Foundry 4.0 Center is located, “It mimics more of what you do in industry,” Carter said. “It’s just a great opportunity for the students to take what they’ve learned in the classroom and go down there and both learn and also use it as a way to create income for themselves while they’re in school.”
Nathaniel Bryant, project engineer manager for the Metal Casting Center, said when he was an undergraduate, he originally wanted to be a math teacher. Then he found the Applied Engineering Building at UNI and the Metal Casting Center and started working there. And later, he worked at the Foundry 4.0 Center.
“I was like, wow, this is what math is actually used for,” he said. “[I] fell in love with the building and the culture.”
He said he decided to switch majors from math to manufacturing, engineering technology with an emphasis in metal casting and made the Applied Engineering Building his home base.
“I was here for 12 hours a day, whether it be working in the foundry or participating in my classes or working on homework with my buddies,” Bryant said. “That whole thing just contributed to a tremendous college experience where I got to learn not only theory, but also practice that theory.”
These days, Bryant and Josh O’Dell, project engineer for the Foundry 4.0 Center, work together to employ students and solve industry problems.
Bryant said most foundries make parts for tractors, planes and cars. The centers don’t do any of that.
“For the most part we make test castings,” Bryant said. “So we have designed these castings to produce specific defective phenomena, we design them to fail in a specific way. That way, we can look at material and process solutions to mitigate that failure. So if it fails in one way and we change something, and it doesn’t fail again, we have a potential solution for that specific problem that people see in industry.”
The goals of the centers are simple. Bryant said they want to advance technology adoption in the metal casting industry.
“A lot of cases, they are hesitant, they are unfamiliar with the technology,” he said. “We are trying to lower those barriers.”
The Foundry 4.0 and Metal Casting centers serve about 100 foundries, foundry suppliers or manufacturers, with approximately 80% of projects dedicated to small or medium enterprises, according to the TechWorks website.
The Foundry 4.0 Center is focused on doing more things, like robotics or using artificial intelligence in processes – “all the new-age things that have been popping up in the last couple of years,” O’Dell said.
Lately, industry partners have said their main issue is finding people to work for them, he said. They have “started using robots and learning how the robots can be used in the foundry processes, whether it be there’s some people using robots to pour the metal, or handling of heavy casting.”
The Foundry 4.0 Center is focused on having humans work on what they are good at and having robots doing the things they are good at, like “menial repetitive tasks,” Bryant said.
“Then humans can use cognition and adapt,” he said. “We are in the midst of a manufacturing revolution right now.”
The two centers are self-sustaining nonprofits – operating funds do not come from the university, Bryant said. Funding comes from a combination of state money, federal work and industrial research projects, he said.
For the research projects, a partner might want to sell a new product in the market or test whether the product is viable, Bryant said.
“And we’ll go through a full range of tests to tell them yes or no if it’s viable to sell into the industry,” he said. “And since we’re pretty much world-renowned for that kind of thing, we have people lining up to work on that kind of thing.”
Bryant said he has this advice for someone getting frustrated while working on an innovative process: “It’s really finding a team and leveraging that team’s strengths,” he said. “Josh and I have different strengths, and I think together we can accomplish more than we can accomplish by ourselves.”