Mary Planeta Fitzgerald, president of Acme Wire Products in Mystic, hadn’t thought too much about using a 3D printer to produce the company’s wire masks for lacrosse helmets until a UConn design specialist came to visit and showed her how it would save time and money.
Joe Luciani, who is based at UConn’s Innovation Partnership Building talked with a tool designer at Acme to develop a plan to use a 3D printer for a critical part of production.
“It really opened up the possibilities of how we could use 3D printing in our factory and operations,” Fitzgerald said recently. “We are still working with UConn on utilizing the technology in different ways. Now we know we can do ‘X,’ maybe we can do ‘Y.’ ”
That’s exactly how the services offered through UConn’s gleaming new Innovation Partnership Building are supposed to operate. The center provides technological assistance to industry from startups to global corporations, helping them solve problems, test new ideas and stay on the leading edge. The building officially opened last month.
“We call this technology infusion,” said Michael Accorsi, senior associate dean in the UConn School of Engineering. “It’s the idea of going to a company that may have been doing the same thing for a hundred years and it’s not very efficient. It’s costing them. It’s making them less competitive. We go in and and say, you can change this with this new technology. We show them how to use it, they adopt it and then they become more competitive.”
The Innovation Partnership Building, which cost $130 million, including road and site improvements, is home to $40 million worth of state-of-the art research equipment, including some of the most advanced and powerful electron microscopes in the world and a variety of 3D printers.
Ten major industry partners — including United Technologies, Fraunhofer, Pratt & Whitney and Eversource — have invested more than $80 million to establish research and development centers at the building that range from advanced manufacturing to biomedical devices to cybersecurity.
In a stroll through the expansive building — 113,700 square feet on three floors — faculty members, graduate students, undergraduates and industry experts can be seen collaborating in centers, many visible through glass office walls.
Radenka Maric, vice president for research at UConn, said she likes having a glass-front office because it “ensures a lot of interaction, that we don’t sit in silos. People can see what we do … It means inclusion. It means we are open.”
At the Eversource Energy Center, which also has glass-walled offices, collaborative teams work on understanding weather patterns so the energy company can plan its response to outages and collaborate on topics such as grid security and tree maintenance.
“There are algorithms that tell you,” said Pamir Alpay, executive director of the Innovation Partnership Building, of the tree cutting.
The building was “specifically designed to reinvigorate industry-academic partnerships in the state,” a brochure for the building says, and to bridge the gap between the very different cultures of the academy and industry, “to create an innovation hub where a hybrid of university-industry cultures is the norm.”
Alpay explained: “It’s not open-ended research” that industry leaders are after, but rather “research with a deadline and an application in mind.”
“We have excellent faculty who speak the industrial language, they have the same mindset,” he said.
Alpay said that it’s very unusual for a university to have the kind of technological equipment found at the Innovation Partnership Building — that companies would have to go to a national laboratory to find similar capabilities, which would be far more costly and complicated.
The complex also contains a manufacturing center where companies can test the viability of certain materials under various extreme conditions and a “proof of concept” center where ideas can be further tested.
“The amount of manufactured parts that companies make that are rejected for some reason and then thrown out is enormous and the cost to manufacturing in this state is enormous,” said Accorsi. “So by using the measurement tools, the simulations and the testing here, we can essentially tell manufacturers how to avoid that. That’s key to keeping these companies more competitive. If they have a 20 percent rate of failure, that’s a huge loss for them and it’s very expensive.”
In some cases, Accorsi said, a manufacturer may discover that the materials they are using can’t withstand the temperatures or loads needed.
“They may decide, ‘we need a new material,’” Accorsi said. “You can actually build materials here and test them. This eliminates the trial and error in the manufacturing process which is super-expensive.”
For years, it had taken Acme staff members 40 hours of work to machine a “welding fixture,” a brace needed to hold the wires in place as they are being welded into a mask.
Fitzgerald, president at Acme, said the company had considered 3D printing “but not seriously because we didn’t feel that we had enough need to justify the expense.”
UConn’s help, which was supported through grants from the Quiet Corner Innovation Cluster, Fitzgerald said “allowed us to utilize the technology without having the burden of acquiring the equipment and dedicating a person to it.”
With a 3D printer, the needed brace can be created overnight in a process that does not have to be monitored by an employee.
“It’s quite an improvement in production,” said Fitzgerald.
Accorsi said the testing equipment can also provide insights into why a particular material is failing.
That was the case for Loos & Co., a wire and cable manufacturer in Pomfret that works with wires as small as one third the size of a human hair.
Robert Davis, vice president for sales and marketing with Loos, said the company had one wire they knew worked well in a particular application and another that did not, but they did not understand why.
“They were able to provide the time and the engineers and the ability to see at levels inaccessible to us as a small manufacturer,” Davis said. “They were able to use a lot of their imaging software and imaging equipment to help us understand the output of our process.”
Davis said UConn’s help, which was funded through grants from the Quiet Corner Innovation Cluster, was “such a boon for us, especially in Eastern Connecticut.”
“We can run a manufacturing operation, we just don’t have the resources, time and money to go out and buy that type of imaging technology,” Davis said. “They were able to give us insight into the performance of our product that we would not have gained anywhere nearly as quickly.”
The research helped the company “fast track a lot of the work we were doing … They were able to to confirm some of our assumptions about aerospace products that we would have only been able to infer from testing data as opposed to going right to the source.”
