• Ford Motor Company will partner with ANL to study the effect of dimensional tolerances on the cylinder-to-cylinder variation in engine performance in a project titled “CFD Study of Impact of Part-to-Part Variations on Spark-Ignition Engine Charge Formation.”

• LanzaTech Inc. will partner with LLNL to develop a multiphase CFD model for turbulent bubbly flow in airlift bioreactors in a project titled “Innovative Bioreactor Designs for Process Intensification in Biological Natural Gas Conversion.”

• Arconic, Inc. will partner with ORNL to develop high-melting-point, lightweight alloys in a project titled “High Performance Computing for Phase Predictions for Multi-Component Alloy Systems.”

• GE Global Research will partner with ORNL to reduce process development time and accelerate process certification of additively manufactured parts in a project titled “Powder Spreading Process Maps for Metal Additive Manufacturing.”

• LLNL will partner with United Research Technologies Corporation to reduce defects in additively manufactured parts in a project titled “High Fidelity Physics-based Model Driven Process Parameter Selection for LPBF Additive Manufactured Metallic Aerospace Components.”

• General Electric Research Corporation will partner with ORNL to reduce manufacturing costs in a project titled “Surface Roughness Effects from Additive Manufacturing in High Efficiency Gas Turbine Combustion Systems.”

• Applied Materials, Inc., will partner with LLNL to improve powder bed formation in additively manufacturing processes in a project titled “Simulating Properties of Metal Powder Beds Used for Additive Manufacturing of Parts in Semiconductor, Solar and Display Equipment.”

• LBNL will partner with Samsung Semiconductor, Inc. (USA) to optimize the performance of semiconductor device interconnects in a project titled “Making semiconductor devices cool through HPC ab initio simulations.”

• Arconic, Inc. will partner with LLNL and ORNL to develop new lightweight alloys in a project titled “Computational Modeling of Multi-Strand Aluminum DC Vertical Casting Processes Incorporating Cast Structure and Thermal Treatment Effects Contributing to Rework Energy Losses.”

• 7AC Technologies will partner with NREL to improve air conditioning technologies in a project titled “Modeling water vapor transport at liquid/membrane interfaces for applications in liquid desiccant air conditioners.”

• Sierra Energy will partner with LLNL to enable gasification technologies to reduce landfill waste and create renewable energy in a project titled “High Performance Computing of Sierra Energy’s FastOx Gasification Polisher to Optimize Waste-to-Syngas Conversion.”

• 8 Rivers Capital will partner with LLNL to develop a robust oxy-fuel sCO₂ combustion CFD model to evaluate the performance of the Allam Cycle combustor in a project titled “Advancement of combustion design and modelling techniques through the application of high performance computing to sCO₂ combustor development.”

• The Timken Company will partner with ORNL to improve reliability and lifetime of wind turbines in a project titled “Crystal Plasticity Finite Element Model to Study the Effect of Microstructural Constituents on White Etch Area formation in Bearing Steels.”

Each of the 13 newly selected projects will receive up to $300,000 to support work performed by the national lab partners and allow the partners to use HPC compute cycles.

The Advanced Manufacturing Office (AMO) recently published a draft of its Multi-year Program Plan that identifies the technology, research and development, outreach, and crosscutting activities that AMO plans to focus on over the next five years. Some of the technical focus areas in the plan align with the high-priority, energy-related manufacturing activities that the HPC4Mfg program also aims to address.

Led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory as strong partners, the HPC4Mfg program has a diverse portfolio of small and large companies, consortiums, and institutes within varying industry sectors that span the country. Established in 2015, it currently supports 28 projects that range from improved turbine blades for aircraft engines and reduced heat loss in electronics, to steel-mill energy efficiency and improved fiberglass production.