The Clean Energy Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute (CESMII), a national institute for smart manufacturing, announced a request for proposals (RFP) for institute roadmap projects on Tuesday.
An institute statement said the new RFP will involve small, medium and large manufacturers, and address essential “cross-industry technical challenges and cross-industry energy intensive manufacturing processes.”
The project will have a total investment of approximately $18,750,000, with 50% in CESMII funding and 50% in awardee cost-share requirement with funding being distributed over the course of three waves of approximately $6.25 million.
Key themes for the project are:
- Common challenges faced by manufacturers in improving productivity, precision and performance of their manufacturing processes.
- Technical gaps that need to be resolved in sensing, control, modeling and analytics and platform technologies to overcome the above challenges, as well as emerging technologies that will impact information flow between them.
- Smart Manufacturing solutions for common cross-industry energy intensive processes such as thermal processing.
The project’s first wave of funding will focus on research and development, with a second wave of funding to be requested in August 2019 for platform capability and workforce and a final wave of funding to be requested in September 2019 for innovation projects, profiles and apps.
An institute statement said CESMII “intends to fund roadmap projects in this RFP with the greatest chance of helping achieve the goals and mission of CESMII.”
