NSF Award
9561697
This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will explore an automated design, analysis, and manufacturing (ADAM) system specific to an advanced spray cooling technology. The system will incorporate the most recent advances in parametric design, finite element analysis (FEA), database management, and dynamic data exchange, coupled to principles of design for manufacturability and assembly, agile and just-in-time manufacturing, and virtual corporations. Phase I will demonstrate key feasibility issues. Specifically, an `intelligent` interface will access customer input of multi-chip module (MCM) geometry and operational constraints to automate the generation of a 3-dimensional solid model of an optimized spray cooled MCM. Integration tools will transfer this model to FEA for performance predictions and generate the appropriate machine code for automatic fabrication of a prototype. The ADAM system will be applied to advanced spray cooling for electronics manufacture. However specific to spray cooling, the techniques and methodologies developed here will be widely applicable to other mechanical systems. As an `enabling` technology, it will be applied to supercomputers, advanced servers, MCMs, power electronics, radar, and avionics. This range of design requirements necessitates a general strategy in Phase I, which is expected to be widely useful in the research field of agile manufacturing. Once fully developed, turn key ADAM systems can be supplied to many commercial users.
