This funding opportunity announcement (FOA) is being issued by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office (AMMTO). The mission of AMMTO is: “We inspire people and drive innovation to transform materials and manufacturing for America's energy future.” This is in alignment with AMMTO’s vision for the future – a globally competitive U.S. manufacturing sector that accelerates the adoption of innovative materials and manufacturing technologies in support of a clean, decarbonized economy.
To realize a clean, decarbonized economy, we must drive innovation to transform resources, materials, and manufacturing for energy applications. The U.S. ramp up of production of technologies that are needed for this energy transition will require new materials, new manufacturing processes, and new circular materials flows.
The modernization of manufacturing can help bring these innovations on-line at the needed scale and quality faster. Among the most important trends to impact the manufacturing sector is the drive toward digitalization, which is the process of employing digital technologies and information to transform the manufacturing enterprise system and business operations across the total production lifecycle. Smart manufacturing provides a systemic approach for the digital transformation of manufacturing that holds great promise to significantly improve productivity, efficiency, safety, security, and sustainability of U.S. manufacturing and energy systems.
While there has been significant support of digitization innovation, the manufacturing sector has been relatively slow to adopt digital technologies. This is problematic as digital transformation—through its improvements in cost, quality, productivity, time to market, efficiency, safety, security, and sustainability—holds great promise to transform how we manufacture products and materials for our energy future.
Smart manufacturing refers to the suite of platform technologies that directly support the digital transformation of the manufacturing enterprise across the entire production lifecycle, which includes design, process, production, supply network, and enterprise levels. Platform technologies are manufacturing technologies that can be applied to manufacture multiple products. The digital transformation of manufacturing through smart manufacturing platform technologies would promote the development of cyberphysical systems (CPS) for manufacturing. A vision for CPS for manufacturing is the development of modular, interconnected systems that combine physical processes, computational resources, and networked communication to create a highly automated, efficient, and flexible manufacturing environment. In such systems, physical components (e.g., machinery, robots, sensors) would be interconnected with software and data networks, enabling real-time monitoring, control, and optimization of manufacturing processes. This would enable a host of significant capabilities including real-time data processing and feedback, advanced automation and control, enhanced flexibility and adaptability, and improved efficiency and quality.
1. Institutions of higher education;
2. For-profit entities;
3. Nonprofit entities;
4. State and local governmental entities; and
5. Indian Tribes, as defined in section 4 of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, 25 U.S.C. § 530424